Papers by Ziyin Zhang
An Empirical Study of Frame Selection for Text-to-Video Retrieval (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text-to-video retrieval select a subset of frames to represent video content . current methods only explore video contents while ignoring relevancy to texts . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a subset of frames to represent video content for TVR . they analyze six different frame selection methods to determine their effectiveness . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves retrieval efficiency without sacrificing visual details . the proposed method explores the video contents while ignoring relevancy to texts . |
Draft Model Knows When to Stop: Self-Verification Speculative Decoding for Long-Form Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Conventional speculative decoding methods use a predefined length policy for proposing drafts, but the reality deviates from this assumption. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-verification length policy that adaptively determines the lengths of draft sequences by referring to the draft entropy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 17% speedup on MT-Bench and 22% speedup in long-form reasoning. |
Reinforcement Learning with Semantic Rewards Enables Low-Resource Language Expansion without Alignment Tax (2026.findings-acl)
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Zeli Su, Ziyin Zhang, Zhou Liu, Xuexian Song, Zhankai Xu, Longfei Zheng, Xiaolu Zhang, Rong Fu, Guixian Xu, Wentao Zhang
| Challenge: | Extending large language models to low-resource languages often incurs an "alignment tax" token-level fine-tuning enforces token-level surface imitation on narrow and biased data distributions. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic-space alignment paradigm powered by group-level semantic rewards instead of likelihood maximization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model acquires low-resource capa- bilities while mitigating alignment tax on Tibetan–Chinese machine translation and Ti- betan headline generation. |
Multilingual Encoder Knows more than You Realize: Shared Weights Pretraining for Extremely Low-Resource Languages (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | XLM-R and mBART have advanced multilingualism in NLP, but low-resource languages such as Tibetan, Uyghur, Kazakh, and Mongolian are underserved. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for adapting multilingual encoders to text generation in extremely low-resource languages by reusing the weights between the encoder and the decoder. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework performs better on various downstream tasks even when compared with much larger models. |
MELA: Multilingual Evaluation of Linguistic Acceptability (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks on linguistic acceptability have been used to evaluate language models' ability to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable sentences. |
| Approach: | They present the largest benchmark to date on linguistic acceptability: MELA . they establish LLM baselines on this benchmark and investigate cross-lingual transfer in acceptability judgements with XLM-R. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source models on cross-lingual transfer in acceptability judgements. |
CMHG: A Dataset and Benchmark for Headline Generation of Minority Languages in China (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Minority languages in China face significant challenges due to their unique writing systems, which differ from international standards. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset specifically curated for headline generation tasks for minority languages in China . they propose 50,000 entries each for Uyghur and Mongolian, and a test set annotated by native speakers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset will help improve headline generation in minority languages . it includes 100,000 entries for Tibetan, 50,000 entries each for Uyghur and Mongolian . |
FTibSuite: A Comprehensive Resource Suite for Tibetan Vision–Language Modeling (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | FTibSuite provides an end-to-end training-and-evaluation workflow for vision–language models . Tibetan is underserved due to the lack of infrastructure for reproducible training and evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a resource-centric workflow for Tibetan VLMs that provides an end-to-end training-and-evaluation workflow and human-verified multimodal annotations. |
| Outcome: | FTibSuite provides an end-to-end training-and-evaluation workflow and human-verified multimodal annotations. |
TingIS: Real-time Risk Event Discovery from Noisy Customer Incidents at Enterprise Scale (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | a 5minute downtime for an incident could result in a loss of 40 million dollars and erosion of user trust. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-stage event unification engine that synergizes efficient indexing techniques with Large Language Models (LLMs) to make informed decisions on event merging. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms baseline methods in routing accuracy, clustering quality, and Signal-to-Noise Ratio. |
GALLa: Graph Aligned Large Language Models for Improved Source Code Understanding (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Programming languages have rich semantics that are represented by graphs and not available from the surface form of source code. |
| Approach: | They propose to use graph neural networks and cross-modal alignment technologies to inject structural information of code into LLMs as an auxiliary task during finetuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on five code tasks with six different baseline LLMs, while incurring no cost at inference time. |
BabyBabelLM: A Multilingual Benchmark of Developmentally Plausible Training Data (2026.eacl-long)
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Jaap Jumelet, Abdellah Fourtassi, Akari Haga, Bastian Bunzeck, Bhargav Shandilya, Diana Galvan-Sosa, Faiz Ghifari Haznitrama, Francesca Padovani, Francois Meyer, Hai Hu, Julen Etxaniz, Laurent Prevot, Linyang He, María Grandury, Mila Marcheva, Negar Foroutan, Nikitas Theodoropoulos, Pouya Sadeghi, Siyuan Song, Suchir Salhan, Susana Zhou, Yurii Paniv, Ziyin Zhang, Arianna Bisazza, Alex Warstadt, Leshem Choshen
| Challenge: | prevailing trend in language modeling research is to prioritize scaling, authors say . from infancy to maturity, English learners acquire language through exposure to less than 100M words . |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual collection of datasets modeling the language a person observes from birth until they acquire a native language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform models trained on a fixed, developmentally plausible English corpus on various benchmarks. |