Papers by Ziyi Cao
A Dual Contrastive Learning Framework for Enhanced Multimodal Conversational Emotion Recognition (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods struggle to capture emotion shifts due to label replication and fail to preserve positive independent modality contributions during fusion. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dual Contrastive Learning Framework that enhances existing MERC models without additional data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models on two MERC benchmark datasets and shows that it reduces label dependence and enhances emotion-sensitive independent modality features. |
Can Factual Opinions Be Edited (Manipulated) in Large Language Models? (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for factual opinion editing focus on atomic facts, ignoring the risks associated with factual opinions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that achieves opinion–evidence alignment without relying on explicit instructions to edit factual opinions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves opinion–evidence alignment without relying on explicit instructions. |
Attribution-Based Analysis and Optimization of Modular Agentic Workflows (2026.findings-acl)
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Yingxuan Yang, Bo Huang, Siyuan Qi, Chao Feng, Haoyi Hu, Yuxuan Zhu, Jinbo Hu, Haoran Zhao, Ziyi He, Xiao Liu, ZongYu Wang, Muning Wen, Lin Qiu, Xuezhi Cao, Xunliang Cai, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have driven the rise of agentic workflows . yet, how can we attribute performance gains to individual upgrades and their interactions? |
| Approach: | They propose a game-theoretic framework that models component upgrades as players and evaluates component coalitions to compute Shapley values. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides interaction-aware attribution and recommendation for model allocation under a fixed workflow structure. |
Shadow-Activated Backdoor Attacks on Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Ziyi Yin, Muchao Ye, Yuanpu Cao, Jiaqi Wang, Aofei Chang, Han Liu, Jinghui Chen, Ting Wang, Fenglong Ma
| Challenge: | Existing backdoor attacks on Multimodal Large Language Models are less applicable to open-ended conversations with users. |
| Approach: | They propose a shadow-activated backdoor attack scenario where attackers inject malicious content into the responses of MLLMs when the responses explicitly relate to the shadowed object. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves the desired behaviors by constructing a poisoned dataset and implementing an attention-regularized tuning strategy. |
AiM: Taking Answers in Mind to Correct Chinese Cloze Tests in Educational Applications (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to correct handwritten assignments are to use OCR to recognize characters and compare them to answers. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal approach to correct handwritten Chinese characters by combining the visual information of students' handwriting with the encoded representations of answers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms OCR-based methods by a large margin. |
Reinforcing Agentic Search Via Reward Density Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is a promising approach for enhancing agentic search, but its performance is often hindered by reward sparsity . |
| Approach: | They propose a new research problem to improve the reward obtained per unit of exploration cost by using a system that decomposes long-horizon tasks into intermediate objectives and assigns process-level rewards to provide denser learning signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong baselines on several agentic search benchmarks and achieves comparable performance to that of advanced proprietary models. |
ICDAGENT: Empowering Agentic Large Language Models for Explainable Medical Coding (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models lack convincing, human-understandable explanations, making them difficult for physicians to trust and use in practice. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aims to automatically assign ICD codes to clinical notes while providing explicit justifications for each assignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves effective ICD coding with accurate explanations using two collaborative LLM agents: a coding agent and a critical agent. |