Papers by Zijing Shi
Spiral of Silence in Large Language Model Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing theories of Spiral of Silence do not apply to large language models . |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation framework for examining SoS in large language models . they consider four controlled conditions that vary the availability of "History" and "Persona" signals . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework examines the SoS-like dynamics in large language models . it shows that history and persona together produce strong majority dominance . |
Why Do More Experts Fail? A Theoretical Analysis of Model Merging (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zijing Wang, Xingle Xu, YongKang Liu, Yiqun Zhang, Peiqin Lin, Shi Feng, Daling Wang, Xiaocui Yang, Hinrich Schuetze
| Challenge: | Existing methods for model merging struggle to maintain performance gains as the number of merged models increases. |
| Approach: | They propose a Reparameterized Heavy-Tailed method to extend the merged model’s coverage and enhance performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method extends the merged model’s coverage and enhances performance on 19 benchmarks, including knowledge-intensive and general-purpose tasks. |
CHBias: Bias Evaluation and Mitigation of Chinese Conversational Language Models (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on social biases in language models have focused on only English. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Chinese dataset for bias evaluation and mitigation of Chinese conversational language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes under-explored bias categories, such as ageism and appearance biases, which received less attention in previous studies. |
Lost in Pronunciation: Detecting Chinese Offensive Language Disguised by Phonetic Cloaking Replacement (2025.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Haotan Guo, Jianfei He, Jiayuan Ma, Hongbin Na, Zimu Wang, Haiyang Zhang, Qi Chen, Wei Wang, Zijing Shi, Tao Shen, Ling Chen
| Challenge: | Phonetic Cloaking Replacement (PCR) is a problem in content moderation in China. |
| Approach: | They organize PCR into a four-way surface-form taxonomy and compile PCR-ToxiCN, a dataset of 500 phonetically cloaked offensive posts gathered from the RedNote platform. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves only an F1-score and zero-shot chain-of-thought prompting pushes performance even lower. |
Benchmarking Web Agent Safety under E-commerce Deceptive Interfaces (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing web agents are highly susceptible to multiple classes of deceptive interfaces, but they are not designed to mitigate these failures. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight plugin framework that allows controlled injection of deceptive interface patterns into existing web environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables controlled injection of deceptive interface patterns into web environments. |
Hazards in Daily Life? Enabling Robots to Proactively Detect and Resolve Anomalies (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zirui Song, Guangxian Ouyang, Meng Fang, Hongbin Na, Zijing Shi, Zhenhao Chen, Fu Yujie, Zeyu Zhang, Shiyu Jiang, Miao Fang, Ling Chen, Xiuying Chen
| Challenge: | Existing household robots are inability to recognize potential problems or dangers in home environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of creating anomaly scenarios using generative models instead of manually labeled data to build simulated environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models in terms of task description and scene diversity. |
Self-imitation Learning for Action Generation in Text-based Games (2023.eacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Text-based games are situated systems where the game agents observe textual descriptions, and generate textual commands to interact with the environment. |
| Approach: | They propose a confidence-based self-imitation model to generate action candidates for the RL agent by exploiting past valuable trajectories to adapt a pre-trained language model towards a target game. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well in multiple challenging games. |
Look Within or Beyond? A Theoretical Comparison Between Parameter-Efficient and Full Fine-Tuning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) is an alternative to Full-Parameter Fine-tuning, but its effectiveness on complex tasks such as reasoning and instruction-following remains unclear. |
| Approach: | They propose to use PEFT to reduce the number of trainable parameters while freezing the weights of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods perform well on standard tasks, but weaknesses on complex and adversarial settings call for new directions beyond current paradigms. |
PlaM: Training-Free Plateau-Guided Model Merging for Better Visual Grounding in MLLMs (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zijing Wang, YongKang Liu, Mingyang Wang, Ercong Nie, Deyuan Chen, Zhengjie Zhao, Shi Feng, Daling Wang, Xiaocui Yang, Yifei Zhang, Hinrich Schuetze
| Challenge: | Multimodal instruction fine-tuning degrades textual reasoning capability, undermining multimodal performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a plateau-guided model merging method that selectively injects base language model parameters into MLLMs to mitigate this degradation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces multimodal instruction fine-tuning degradation by incorporating a plateau-guided model merging method into MLLMs. |
More than Minorities and Majorities: Understanding Multilateral Bias in Language Generation (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on bias dataset construction and mitigation focus on one demographic group . in real-world applications, there are more than two demographic groups at risk of the same bias. |
| Approach: | They propose to analyze and reduce biases across multiple demographic groups using a multi-demographic bias dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can mitigate biases among multiple demographic groups effectively, the authors show . |