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Chengxiang Zhai

28 accepted papers

2026

HEV Generative Sandbox: A Framework for Assessing Domain-Specific Social Risks Through Human-LLM Simulation

AAAI 2026technical

Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) in specialized domains introduces significant societal and compliance risks, including bias amplification, misinformation propagation, and privacy violations. These risks predominantly emerge from the dynamic interactions between LLMs and humans in specific con

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

PlugMem: A Task-Agnostic Plugin Memory Module for LLM Agents

ICML 2026poster

Long-term memory is essential for large language model (LLM) agents operating in complex environments, yet existing memory designs are either task-specific and non-transferable, or task-agnostic but less effective due to low task-relevance and context explosion from raw memory retrieval. We propose …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

VTool-R1: VLMs Learn to Think with Images via Reinforcement Learning on Multimodal Tool Use

ICLR 2026poster

Reinforcement learning finetuning (RFT) has significantly advanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by enabling long chains of thought, multi-turn self-correction, and effective tool use. While recent works attempt to extend RFT to vision-language models (VLMs), these effor…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Beyond Reactive Safety: Risk-Aware LLM Alignment via Long-Horizon Simulation

ACL 2025finding

Given the growing influence of language model-based agents on high-stakes societal decisions, from public policy to healthcare, ensuring their beneficial impact requires understanding the far-reaching implications of their suggestions. We propose a proof-of-concept framework that projects how model-…

2025

Cache-of-Thought: Master-Apprentice Framework for Cost-Effective Vision Language Model Reasoning

EMNLP 2025

Vision Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success in a wide range of vision applications of increasing complexity and scales, yet choosing the right VLM model size involves a trade-off between response quality and cost. While smaller VLMs are cheaper to run, they typically produce respo

2025

ModelingAgent: Bridging LLMs and Mathematical Modeling for Real-World Challenges

EMNLP 2025

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has enabled substantial advances in solving mathematical problems. However, existing benchmarks often fail to reflect real-world complexity, which demand open-ended, interdisciplinary reasoning and integration of computational tools. To address this ga

2025

ORBIT: Cost-Effective Dataset Curation for Large Language Model Domain Adaptation with an Astronomy Case Study

ACL 2025finding

Recent advances in language modeling demonstrate the need for high-quality domain-specific training data, especially for tasks that require specialized knowledge. General-purpose models, while versatile, often lack the depth needed for expert-level tasks because of limited domain-specific informatio…

2025

Persona-DB: Efficient Large Language Model Personalization for Response Prediction with Collaborative Data Refinement

COLING 2025main

The increasing demand for personalized interactions with large language models (LLMs) calls for methodologies capable of accurately and efficiently identifying user opinions and preferences. Retrieval augmentation emerges as an effective strategy, as it can accommodate a vast number of users without…

Cited by 17SourcePDFScholar
2025

The Law of Knowledge Overshadowing: Towards Understanding, Predicting and Preventing LLM Hallucination

ACL 2025finding

Hallucination is a persistent challenge in large language models (LLMs), where even with rigorous quality control, models often generate distorted facts. This paradox, in which error generation continues despite high-quality training data, calls for a deeper understanding of the underlying LLM mecha…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

What Makes In-context Learning Effective for Mathematical Reasoning

ICML 2025poster

Owing to the capability of in-context learning, large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance across diverse mathematical reasoning benchmarks. However, we find that few-shot demonstrations can sometimes bring negative performance and their effectiveness on LLMs' reasoning abilities…

2024

Bias and Volatility: A Statistical Framework for Evaluating Large Language Model's Stereotypes and the Associated Generation Inconsistency

NeurIPS 2024poster

We present a novel statistical framework for analyzing stereotypes in large language models (LLMs) by systematically estimating the bias and variation in their generation. Current evaluation metrics in the alignment literature often overlook the randomness of stereotypes caused by the inconsistent g…

Cited by 2SourceScholar
2024

Seed-Guided Fine-Grained Entity Typing in Science and Engineering Domains

AAAI 2024technical

Accurately typing entity mentions from text segments is a fundamental task for various natural language processing applications. Many previous approaches rely on massive human-annotated data to perform entity typing. Nevertheless, collecting such data in highly specialized science and engineering do…

2024

UOUO: Uncontextualized Uncommon Objects for Measuring Knowledge Horizons of Vision Language Models

EMNLP 2024main

Smaller-scale Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often claim to perform on par with larger models in general-domain visual grounding and question-answering benchmarks while offering advantages in computational efficiency and storage. However, their ability to handle rare objects, which fall into the long…

2023

Decoding the Silent Majority: Inducing Belief Augmented Social Graph with Large Language Model for Response Forecasting

EMNLP 2023long main

Automatic response forecasting for news media plays a crucial role in enabling content producers to efficiently predict the impact of news releases and prevent unexpected negative outcomes such as social conflict and moral injury. To effectively forecast responses, it is essential to develop measure…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Learning by Applying: A General Framework for Mathematical Reasoning via Enhancing Explicit Knowledge Learning

AAAI 2023technical

Mathematical reasoning is one of the crucial abilities of general artificial intelligence, which requires machines to master mathematical logic and knowledge from solving problems. However, existing approaches are not transparent (thus not interpretable) in terms of what knowledge has been learned a…

2023

Measuring the Effect of Influential Messages on Varying Personas

ACL 2023short

Predicting how a user responds to news events enables important applications such as allowing intelligent agents or content producers to estimate the effect on different communities and revise unreleased messages to prevent unexpected bad outcomes such as social conflict and moral injury. We present…

2023

Social Commonsense-Guided Search Query Generation for Open-Domain Knowledge-Powered Conversations

EMNLP 2023short findings

Open-domain dialog involves generating search queries that help obtain relevant knowledge for holding informative conversations. However, it can be challenging to determine what information to retrieve when the user is passive and does not express a clear need or request. To tackle this issue, we pr…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Sparse Modular Activation for Efficient Sequence Modeling

NeurIPS 2023poster

Recent hybrid models combining Linear State Space Models (SSMs) with self-attention mechanisms have demonstrated impressive results across a range of sequence modeling tasks. However, current approaches apply attention modules statically and uniformly to all elements in the input sequences, leading…

2023

When to Use What: An In-Depth Comparative Empirical Analysis of OpenIE Systems for Downstream Applications

ACL 2023long

Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) has been used in the pipelines of various NLP tasks. Unfortunately, there is no clear consensus on which models to use in which tasks. Muddying things further is the lack of comparisons that take differing training sets into account. In this paper, we present an…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2022

CONCRETE: Improving Cross-lingual Fact-checking with Cross-lingual Retrieval

COLING 2022main

Fact-checking has gained increasing attention due to the widespread of falsified information. Most fact-checking approaches focus on claims made in English only due to the data scarcity issue in other languages. The lack of fact-checking datasets in low-resource languages calls for an effective cros…

2022

Domain Representative Keywords Selection: A Probabilistic Approach

ACL 2022findings

We propose a probabilistic approach to select a subset of a target domain representative keywords from a candidate set, contrasting with a context domain. Such a task is crucial for many downstream tasks in natural language processing. To contrast the target domain and the context domain, we adapt t…

2022

Improving Candidate Retrieval with Entity Profile Generation for Wikidata Entity Linking

ACL 2022findings

Entity linking (EL) is the task of linking entity mentions in a document to referent entities in a knowledge base (KB). Many previous studies focus on Wikipedia-derived KBs. There is little work on EL over Wikidata, even though it is the most extensive crowdsourced KB. The scale of Wikidata can open…

2022

Language Model Pre-Training with Sparse Latent Typing

EMNLP 2022main

Modern large-scale Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved tremendous success on a wide range of downstream tasks. However, most of the LM pre-training objectives only focus on text reconstruction, but have not sought to learn latent-level interpretable representations of sentences. In this…

2021

BERT might be Overkill: A Tiny but Effective Biomedical Entity Linker based on Residual Convolutional Neural Networks

EMNLP 2021finding

Biomedical entity linking is the task of linking entity mentions in a biomedical document to referent entities in a knowledge base. Recently, many BERT-based models have been introduced for the task. While these models achieve competitive results on many datasets, they are computationally expensive…

2021

Joint Biomedical Entity and Relation Extraction with Knowledge-Enhanced Collective Inference

ACL 2021long

Compared to the general news domain, information extraction (IE) from biomedical text requires much broader domain knowledge. However, many previous IE methods do not utilize any external knowledge during inference. Due to the exponential growth of biomedical publications, models that do not go beyo…

2021

Text2Mol: Cross-Modal Molecule Retrieval with Natural Language Queries

EMNLP 2021main

We propose a new task, Text2Mol, to retrieve molecules using natural language descriptions as queries. Natural language and molecules encode information in very different ways, which leads to the exciting but challenging problem of integrating these two very different modalities. Although some work…

2017

High-Dimensional Variance-Reduced Stochastic Gradient Expectation-Maximization Algorithm

ICML 2017poster

We propose a generic stochastic expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm for the estimation of high-dimensional latent variable models. At the core of our algorithm is a novel semi-stochastic variance-reduced gradient designed for the $Q$-function in the EM algorithm. Under a mild condition on the in…

Cited by 31SourcePDFScholar