Papers by Zijie Zhang
Progra: Progress-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Turn Function Calling (2026.findings-acl)
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Huacan Chai, Zijie Cao, Maolin Ran, Yingxuan Yang, Jianghao Lin, Xin Peng, Hairui Wang, Renjie Ding, Ziyu Wan, Muning Wen, Weiwen Liu, Weinan Zhang, Fei Huang, Ying Wen
| Challenge: | Existing methods for multi-turn function calling are limited by redundancy and lack explicit integration of progress awareness into training. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that explicitly integrates progress awareness into LLM training for multi-turn function calling. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that Progra outperforms existing methods on two public benchmarks. |
Ladder: A Model-Agnostic Framework Boosting LLM-based Machine Translation to the Next Level (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | General-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 have exhibited strong translation abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a model-agnostic model to refine the performance of general-purpose large-language models for machine translation (MT) by utilizing Gemma-2B/7B as the backbone. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model-agnostic and cost-effective tool improves the performance of general-purpose large-language models for machine translation (MT) by integrating it with any general-use LLM. |
CriticSearch: Fine-Grained Credit Assignment for Search Agents via a Retrospective Critic (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing search agent pipelines rely on sparse outcome rewards, leading to inefficient exploration and unstable training. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool-integrated reasoning framework that provides turn-level feedback via a retrospective critic mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in multi-hop reasoning benchmarks and achieves faster convergence and training stability. |
Message Passing on Semantic-Anchor-Graphs for Fine-grained Emotion Representation Learning and Classification (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Emotion classification is an important task with applications in education, virtual reality, and robotics. |
| Approach: | They propose to use token embeddings to generate a "semantic-anchor graph" using semantic anchors, sentences can be projected onto them to form a graph . |
| Outcome: | Empirically, the proposed system can generate meaningful semantic anchors and discriminative graph patterns for different emotion. |
PsyChain: A Collaborative Chain-of-Agents Framework for Generating Personalized and Professional Counseling Dialogues (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing psychological counseling datasets suffer from monolithic client personas, insufficient therapeutic depth, and a lack of process controllability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that evolves static counseling corpora into high-fidelity dialogues . they use a Client Profiler that pairs life scenarios with psychological personality archetypes based on client personality and stage progression . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 61-91% win rates against domain-specific baselines in pairwise evaluation and the highest average score in human evaluation, indicating potential for real-world counseling. |
Concept2Box: Joint Geometric Embeddings for Learning Two-View Knowledge Graphs (2023.findings-acl)
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Zijie Huang, Daheng Wang, Binxuan Huang, Chenwei Zhang, Jingbo Shang, Yan Liang, Zhengyang Wang, Xian Li, Christos Faloutsos, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to embed knowledge graphs have ignored the fact that they contain two fundamentally different views: high-level ontology-view concepts and fine-grained instance-view entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel geometric representation that jointly embeds the two views of a KG using dual geometric representations. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on the public DBpedia KG and a newly-created industrial KG show the proposed method works well. |
TinyScientist: An Interactive, Extensible, and Controllable Framework for Building Research Agents (2025.emnlp-demos)
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Haofei Yu, Keyang Xuan, Fenghai Li, Kunlun Zhu, Zijie Lei, Jiaxun Zhang, Ziheng Qi, Kyle Richardson, Jiaxuan You
| Challenge: | Existing research systems often design and use agentic workflows to perform research tasks such as ideation, scientific coding, review writing, and tree-based search. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source codebase, an interactive web demonstration, and a PyPI Python package to make state-of-the-art auto-research pipelines broadly accessible to every researcher and developer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework adapts easily to new tools and supports iterative growth. |
Fisher Information-based Efficient Curriculum Federated Learning with Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for learning Large Language Models (LLMs) require adaptive data processing and low-rank adjustment to improve accuracy and fine-tuning speed. |
| Approach: | They propose a fisher information-based adaptive federated curriculum learning framework with two novel methods to improve FL fine-tuning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance and fine-tuning speed compared with baseline approaches. |
SyntheT2C: Generating Synthetic Data for Fine-Tuning Large Language Models on the Text2Cypher Task (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing efforts to bolster LLMs’ proficiency in Cypher generation are hindered by the lack of annotated datasets of Query-Cypher pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for constructing a synthetic Query-Cypher pair dataset using LLM prompting and template-filling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enhances the performance of LLMs on Text2Cypher task via SFT. |
Adversarial Attack against Cross-lingual Knowledge Graph Alignment (2021.emnlp-main)
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Zeru Zhang, Zijie Zhang, Yang Zhou, Lingfei Wu, Sixing Wu, Xiaoying Han, Dejing Dou, Tianshi Che, Da Yan
| Challenge: | Existing studies on cross-lingual entity alignment under adversarial attacks have not been conducted. |
| Approach: | They propose to use adversarial attack techniques to perturb cross-lingual entity alignment under adversarials. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model hides the attacked entities in dense regions in two KGs, and reduces the gradient vanishing issues in the process of adversarial attacks for further improving the attack effectiveness. |
FedMABench: Benchmarking Mobile GUI Agents on Decentralized Heterogeneous User Data (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Mobile GUI agents have attracted tremendous research participation recently. traditional approaches to mobile agent training rely on centralized data collection. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for federated training and evaluation of mobile GUI agents . they find that federation algorithms consistently outperform local training . |
| Outcome: | The first benchmark for federated training and evaluation of mobile GUI agents is released . it features 6 datasets with 30+ subsets, 8 federation algorithms, 10+ base models, and over 800 apps across 5 categories . |
Tucker Decomposition with Frequency Attention for Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for temporal knowledge graph completion only consider the combination of one relation with one timestamp, ignoring the global nature of the embedding. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal knowledge Graph Completion model that captures global temporal dependencies between one relation and the entire timestamp. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on three standard TKGC datasets on several metrics. |
PersonaAgent: Bridging Memory and Action for Personalized LLM Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Weizhi Zhang, Xinyang Zhang, Chenwei Zhang, Liangwei Yang, Jingbo Shang, Zhepei Wei, Henry Peng Zou, Zijie Huang, Zhengyang Wang, Yifan Gao, Xiaoman Pan, Lian Xiong, Jingguo Liu, Philip S. Yu, Xian Li
| Challenge: | Existing Large Language Model (LLM) enabled agents lack flexibility to respond to users’ varying needs and preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a test-time user-preference alignment strategy that optimizes the persona prompt, ensuring real-time preference alignment through textual loss feedback between simulated and ground-truth responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods in real-time and in real applications. |
AEGIS: A Holistic Benchmark for Evaluating Forensic Analysis of AI-Generated Academic Images (2026.acl-long)
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Bo Zhang, Tzu-Yen Ma, Zichen Tang, Junpeng Ding, Zirui Wang, Yizhuo Zhao, Peilin Gao, Zijie Xi, Zixin Ding, Haiyang Sun, Haocheng Gao, Yuan Liu, Liangjia Wang, Yiling Huang, Yujie Wang, Yuyue Zhang, Ronghui Xi, Yuanze Li, Jiacheng Liu, Zhongjun Yang, Haihong E
| Challenge: | AEGIS examines whether current models can effectively audit AI-generated images in academic papers. |
| Approach: | They propose a holistic benchmark for forensic analysis of AI-Generated academic ImageS that reveals limitations in academic image forensics. |
| Outcome: | AEGIS compared with existing benchmarks on seven academic categories and features key advances in forensic analysis. |
Mix-of-Granularity: Optimize the Chunking Granularity for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation systems often use a fixed strategy to extract information from multiple sources. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that dynamically determines optimal granularity of a knowledge source based on input queries using a router. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method predicts optimal granularity levels and significantly improves performance in downstream tasks. |
Modeling Intra- and Inter-Modal Relations: Hierarchical Graph Contrastive Learning for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies in Multimodal Sentiment Analysis lack a mechanism to understand complex relations between different modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical graph contrastive learning framework for multimodal sentiment analysis that explores the relationships between modality representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art in multimodal sentiment analysis on two benchmark datasets. |
FUSE: Measure-Theoretic Compact Fuzzy Set Representation for Taxonomy Expansion (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work models taxonomy concepts as vectors or geometric objects, but fuzzy sets are efficient for concept modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a set representation learning task based on fuzzy set approximation . they demonstrate remarkable improvements in taxonomy expansion using FUSE . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves taxonomy expansion performance by 23% over baselines. |
AiraXiv: An AI-Driven Open-Access Platform for Human and AI Scientists (2026.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have accelerated the growth of both human-authored and AI-generated research outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose an AI-driven open-access platform built on open preprints, AI-augmented analysis and review, and reader feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed platform supports human scientists through an interactive UI and AI scientists through Model Context Protocol (MCP)-based interactions. |