Papers by Zimu Wang
A Survey of Large Language Models in Psychotherapy: Current Landscape and Future Directions (2025.findings-acl)
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Hongbin Na, Yining Hua, Zimu Wang, Tao Shen, Beibei Yu, Lilin Wang, Wei Wang, John Torous, Ling Chen
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can handle extensive context and multi-turn reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy dividing psychotherapy into stages of assessment, diagnosis, and treatment to examine LLM advancements and challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy reveals imbalances in current research, such as a focus on common disorders, linguistic biases, fragmented methods, and limited theoretical integration. |
Detecting Conversational Mental Manipulation with Intent-Aware Prompting (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to detect mental manipulations are limited due to complexity of detecting subtle, covert tactics in conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to detect mental manipulations using large language models using intent-aware prompting by capturing the intents of participants. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly reduces false negatives, helping detect more instances of mental manipulation with minimal misjudgment of positive cases. |
MathGenie: Generating Synthetic Data with Question Back-translation for Enhancing Mathematical Reasoning of LLMs (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models have demonstrated outstanding capabilities in mathematical reasoning, but there is a performance gap between open-source models and closed-source ones. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for generating diverse and reliable math problems by leveraging the ground-truth solutions of the seed data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source models across five representative mathematical reasoning datasets. |
OmniEvent: A Comprehensive, Fair, and Easy-to-Use Toolkit for Event Understanding (2023.emnlp-demo)
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| Challenge: | Event understanding is fundamental for humans to understand the world. |
| Approach: | They propose an event understanding toolkit called OmniEvent that is comprehensive and fair . it supports mainstream modeling paradigms and the processing of 15 widely-used datasets . |
| Outcome: | The toolkit supports mainstream modeling paradigms and the processing of 15 widely-used English and Chinese datasets. |
MathCoder-VL: Bridging Vision and Code for Enhanced Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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Ke Wang, Junting Pan, Linda Wei, Aojun Zhou, Weikang Shi, Zimu Lu, Han Xiao, Yunqiao Yang, Houxing Ren, Mingjie Zhan, Hongsheng Li
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LMMs) struggle with simple tasks such as geometry, e.g., arithmetic, and reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage code as supervision for cross-modal alignment . they propose to use FigCodifier and ImgCode-8.6M to synthesize novel mathematical figures . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet in the geometry problem-solving subset of MathVista, achieving improvements of 8.9% and 9.2%. |
FinBPM: A Framework for Portfolio Management-based Financial Investor Behavior Perception Model (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | a portfolio management framework based on reinforcement learning is needed to optimize stock price movements. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that takes irrational investment into account when calculating portfolio weights . they use financial text to analyze intrinsic value information of companies and time series data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework gains 13.26% returns over state-of-the-art models while controlling for risk. |
NUMINA: A Natural Understanding Benchmark for Multi-dimensional Intelligence and Numerical Reasoning Abilities (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Changyu Zeng, Yifan Wang, Zimu Wang, Wei Wang, Zhengni Yang, Muyi Bao, Jimin Xiao, Anh Nguyen, Yutao Yue
| Challenge: | Existing 3D benchmarks lack fine-grained numerical reasoning task annotations, limiting MLLMs’ ability to perform precise spatial measurements and complex numerical reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a 3D-based benchmark to enhance indoor perceptual understanding by using multi-scale annotations and question-answer pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark improves indoor perceptual understanding by incorporating multi-scale annotations and question-answer pairs. |
Probability-Consistent Preference Optimization for Enhanced LLM Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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Yunqiao Yang, Houxing Ren, Zimu Lu, Ke Wang, Weikang Shi, Aojun Zhou, Junting Pan, Mingjie Zhan, Hongsheng Li
| Challenge: | Recent advances in preference optimization have demonstrated significant potential for improving mathematical reasoning capabilities in large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that establishes two quantitative metrics for preference selection: surface-level answer correctness and intrinsic token-level probability consistency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing outcome-only criterion approaches across a diverse range of LLMs and benchmarks. |
Lost in Pronunciation: Detecting Chinese Offensive Language Disguised by Phonetic Cloaking Replacement (2025.emnlp-industry)
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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. |
MathCanvas: Intrinsic Visual Chain-of-Thought for Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Weikang Shi, Aldrich Yu, Rongyao Fang, Houxing Ren, Ke Wang, Aojun Zhou, Changyao Tian, Xinyu Fu, Yuxuan Hu, Zimu Lu, Linjiang Huang, Si Liu, Rui Liu, Hongsheng Li
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to visual chain-of-thought are limited by external tools or fail to generate high-fidelity diagrams. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enable large multimodal models with VCoT capabilities . they pre-train a model on a 15.2M-pair corpus and teach it how to leverage visual aids . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework unlocks complex, human-like visual reasoning in large language models . it pre-trains the model on a 15.2M-pair corpus and fine-tunes it on MathCanvas-Instruct . |
PsychEthicsBench: Evaluating Large Language Models Against Australian Mental Health Ethics (2026.findings-acl)
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Yaling Shen, Stephanie Fong, Yiwen Jiang, Zimu Wang, Feilong Tang, Qingyang Xu, Xiangyu Zhao, Zhongxing Xu, Jiahe Liu, Jinpeng Hu, Dominic Dwyer, Zongyuan Ge
| Challenge: | Mental disorders affect nearly one in seven people worldwide, yet the vast majority do not receive adequate care. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate LLMs' ethical knowledge and behavioral responses through multiple-choice and open-ended tasks with fine-grained ethicality annotations. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results across 14 models reveal that refusal rates are poor indicators of ethical behavior, revealing a significant divergence between safety triggers and clinical appropriateness. |
MAVEN-ERE: A Unified Large-scale Dataset for Event Coreference, Temporal, Causal, and Subevent Relation Extraction (2022.emnlp-main)
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Xiaozhi Wang, Yulin Chen, Ning Ding, Hao Peng, Zimu Wang, Yankai Lin, Xu Han, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing datasets only cover limited relation types at once, which prevents models from taking full advantage of relation interactions. |
| Approach: | They construct a large-scale human-annotated ERE dataset with improved annotation schemes to address these drawbacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is larger than existing datasets of all the ERE tasks by at least an order of magnitude. |
You Never Know a Person, You Only Know Their Defenses: Detecting Levels of Psychological Defense Mechanisms in Supportive Conversations (2026.findings-acl)
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Hongbin Na, Zimu Wang, Zhaoming Chen, Peilin Zhou, Yining Hua, Grace Ziqi Zhou, Haiyang Zhang, Tao Shen, Wei Wang, John Torous, Shaoxiong Ji, Ling Chen
| Challenge: | Psychological defenses are strategies people use to manage distress. |
| Approach: | They propose a dialogue corpus with help seeker utterances labeled for defense level and a DMRS Co-Pilot pipeline that provides evidence-based pre-annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces annotation time by 24.0% in a counterbalanced study. |
Alignment with Fill-In-the-Middle for Enhancing Code Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Houxing Ren, Zimu Lu, Weikang Shi, Haotian Hou, Yunqiao Yang, Ke Wang, Aojun Zhou, Junting Pan, Mingjie Zhan, Hongsheng Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating test cases with limited training data are not reliable and may be counterproductive. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that splits code snippets into smaller, granular blocks, creating more diverse DPO pairs from the same test cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach shows significant improvements in code generation tasks on benchmark datasets such as HumanEval (+), MBPP (+), and APPS. |
Towards Robust Real-World Spreadsheet Understanding with Multi-Agent Multi-Format Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Spreadsheets are among the most widely used data formats in real-world applications . existing large language models treat tables as plain text, overlooking layout cues and visual semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage multi-agent framework for spreadsheet understanding that adopts a step-by-step reading and reasoning paradigm. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on two spreadsheet datasets show the proposed framework outperforms existing methods on Spreadsheet Bench. |
WISE: Weak-Supervision-Guided Step-by-Step Explanations for Multimodal LLMs in Image Classification (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing MCoT methods focus on inter-object reasoning, overlooking intra-object understanding crucial for image classification. |
| Approach: | They propose a Weak-supervision-guided Step-by-step Explanation method that reformulates MCoTs under weak supervision into concise, interpretable reasoning chains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves interpretability by 37% and improves classification accuracy. |
Can GRPO Boost Complex Multimodal Table Understanding? (2025.emnlp-main)
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Xiaoqiang Kang, Shengen Wu, Zimu Wang, Yilin Liu, Xiaobo Jin, Kaizhu Huang, Wei Wang, Yutao Yue, Xiaowei Huang, Qiufeng Wang
| Challenge: | Existing table understanding methods struggle with low initialization accuracy and coarse rewards in tabular contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a three-stage RL framework that enhances multimodal table understanding through: (1) Warm-up that prompts initial perception and reasoning capabilities; (2) Perception Alignment GRPO (PA-GRPO); (3) Hint-Completion GR PO (HC-GRP); |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models on held-in and held-out datasets, outperforming SFT and GRPO largely. |
MedFact: A Large-scale Chinese Dataset for Evidence-based Medical Fact-checking of LLM Responses (2025.emnlp-main)
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Tong Chen, Zimu Wang, Yiyi Miao, Haoran Luo, Sun Yuanfei, Wei Wang, Zhengyong Jiang, Procheta Sen, Jionglong Su
| Challenge: | Existing medical fact-checking datasets focus on human-generated content, leaving the verification of content generated by large language models (LLMs) relatively unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese medical fact-checking datasets to verify LLM-generated medical content by combining in-context learning and fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The first evidence-based Chinese medical fact-checking dataset of LLM-generated medical content consists of 1,321 questions and 7,409 claims . |
LMR-BENCH: Evaluating LLM Agent’s Ability on Reproducing Language Modeling Research (2025.emnlp-main)
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Shuo Yan, Ruochen Li, Ziming Luo, Zimu Wang, Daoyang Li, Liqiang Jing, Kaiyu He, Peilin Wu, Juntong Ni, George Michalopoulos, Yue Zhang, Ziyang Zhang, Mian Zhang, Zhiyu Chen, Xinya Du
| Challenge: | Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated remarkable potential in advancing scientific discovery, but their capability in reproducing code from research papers remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate LLM agents' ability to reproduce scientific research papers by analyzing code reproduction tasks from 23 research papers published in top-tier NLP venues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark systematically evaluates the capability of large language model (LLM) agents on code reproduction from Language Modeling Research. |
Document-level Causal Relation Extraction with Knowledge-guided Binary Question Answering (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on Event-Event Causal Relation Extraction (ECRE) has highlighted the lack of document-level modeling and causal hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge-guided binary Question Answering method with event structures for ECRE that utilizes cross-task knowledge in IE. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on the MECI and MAVEN-ERE datasets. |
CHiRPE: A Step Towards Real-World Clinical NLP with Clinician-Oriented Model Explanations (2026.eacl-short)
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Stephanie Fong, Zimu Wang, Guilherme C Oliveira, Xiangyu Zhao, Yiwen Jiang, Jiahe Liu, Beau-Luke Colton, Scott W. Woods, Martha Shenton, Barnaby Nelson, Zongyuan Ge, Dominic Dwyer
| Challenge: | Psychotic disorders are a major contributor to the global health burden due to their relatively high mortality risk. |
| Approach: | They propose an NLP pipeline that takes semi-structured clinical interviews to predict psychosis risk and generate novel SHAP explanation formats. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline outperforms baseline models and achieves 90% accuracy across three BERT variants. |