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Lizhen Qu

44 accepted papers

2026

NEUSIS: A Compositional Neuro-Symbolic Framework for Autonomous Perception, Reasoning, and Planning in Complex UAV Search Missions

ICRA 2026poster

This paper addresses the problem of autonomous UAV search missions, where a UAV must locate specific Entities of Interest (EOIs) within a time limit, based on brief descriptions in large, hazard-prone environments with keep-out zones. The UAV must perceive, reason, and make decisions with limited an…

2025

Audio Is the Achilles’ Heel: Red Teaming Audio Large Multimodal Models

NAACL 2025long

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have demonstrated the ability to interact with humans under real-world conditions by combining Large Language Models (LLMs) and modality encoders to align multimodal information (visual and auditory) with text. However, such models raise new safety challenges of whethe…

2025

CausalScore: An Automatic Reference-Free Metric for Assessing Response Relevance in Open-Domain Dialogue Systems

COLING 2025main

Automatically evaluating the quality of responses in dialogue systems is a challenging yet crucial task. Current metrics often fail to align with human judgments, especially when assessing responses that are grammatically correct. To address this issue, we propose a novel metric, called CausalScore,…

2025

CultureInstruct: Curating Multi-Cultural Instructions at Scale

NAACL 2025long

Large language models, despite their remarkable success in recent years, still exhibit severe cultural bias. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce CultureInstruct, a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset designed to reduce cultural bias in LLMs. CultureInstruct is constructed with an automatic pip…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

DiscoSG: Towards Discourse-Level Text Scene Graph Parsing through Iterative Graph Refinement

EMNLP 2025

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) generate discourse-level, multi-sentence visual descriptions, challenging text scene graph parsers built for single-sentence caption-to-graph mapping. Current approaches typically merge sentence-level parsing outputs for discourse input, often missing phenomena like cro

2025

IRIS: An Iterative and Integrated Framework for Verifiable Causal Discovery in the Absence of Tabular Data

ACL 2025long

Causal discovery is fundamental to scientific research, yet traditional statistical algorithms face significant challenges, including expensive data collection, redundant computation for known relations, and unrealistic assumptions. While recent LLM-based methods excel at identifying commonly known…

2025

LazyReview: A Dataset for Uncovering Lazy Thinking in NLP Peer Reviews

ACL 2025long

Peer review is a cornerstone of quality control in scientific publishing. With the increasing workload, the unintended use of ‘quick’ heuristics, referred to as lazy thinking, has emerged as a recurring issue compromising review quality. Automated methods to detect such heuristics can help improve t…

2025

NAP2: A Benchmark for Naturalness and Privacy-Preserving Text Rewriting by Learning from Human

EMNLP 2025

The widespread use of cloud-based Large Language Models (LLMs) has heightened concerns over user privacy, as sensitive information may be inadvertently exposed during interactions with these services. To protect privacy before sending sensitive data to those models, we suggest sanitizing sensitive t

2025

NEUSIS: A Compositional Neuro-Symbolic Framework for Autonomous Perception, Reasoning, and Planning in Complex UAV Search Missions

RA-L 2025

This paper addresses the problem of autonomous UAV search missions, where a UAV must locate specific Entities of Interest (EOIs) within a time limit, based on brief descriptions in large, hazard-prone environments with keep-out zones. The UAV must perceive, reason, and make decisions with limited an

Cited by 14SourceScholar
2025

On the Reliability of Large Language Models for Causal Discovery

ACL 2025long

This study investigates the efficacy of Large Language Models (LLMs) in causal discovery. Using newly available open-source LLMs, OLMo and BLOOM, which provide access to their pre-training corpora, we investigate how LLMs address causal discovery through three research questions. We examine: (i) the…

2025

Reshaping Representation Space to Balance the Safety and Over-rejection in Large Audio Language Models

EMNLP 2025

Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) have extended the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by enabling audio-based human interactions. However, recent research has revealed that LALMs remain vulnerable to harmful queries due to insufficient safety-alignment. Despite advances in defence measu

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

SCAR: Data Selection via Style Consistency-Aware Response Ranking for Efficient Instruction-Tuning of Large Language Models

ACL 2025long

Recent studies emphasize that manually ensuring a consistent response style and maintaining high data quality in training sets can significantly improve the performance of fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) while reducing the number of training examples needed. However, the precise definition o…

2025

SurveyPilot: an Agentic Framework for Automated Human Opinion Collection from Social Media

ACL 2025long

Opinion survey research is a crucial method used by social scientists for understanding societal beliefs and behaviors. Traditional methodologies often entail high costs and limited scalability, while current automated methods such as opinion synthesis exhibit severe biases and lack traceability. In…

2025

The Best of Both Worlds: Bridging Quality and Diversity in Data Selection with Bipartite Graph

ICML 2025poster

The performance of large language models (LLMs) is strongly influenced by the quality and diversity of data used during supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, current data selection methods often prioritize one aspect over the other, resulting in suboptimal training outcomes. To address this, we for…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2025

Unbiased Sliced Wasserstein Kernels for High-Quality Audio Captioning

NeurIPS 2025poster

Audio captioning systems face a fundamental challenge: teacher-forcing training creates exposure bias that leads to caption degeneration during inference. While contrastive methods have been proposed as solutions, they typically fail to capture the crucial temporal relationships between acoustic and…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Zero-Shot Privacy-Aware Text Rewriting via Iterative Tree Search

EMNLP 2025

The increasing adoption of large language models (LLMs) in cloud-based services has raised significant privacy concerns, as user inputs may inadvertently expose sensitive information. Existing text anonymization and de-identification techniques, such as rule-based redaction and scrubbing, often stru

2024

Assistive Large Language Model Agents for Socially-Aware Negotiation Dialogues

EMNLP 2024finding

We develop assistive agents based on Large Language Models (LLMs) that aid interlocutors in business negotiations.Specifically, we simulate business negotiations by letting two LLM-based agents engage in role play. A third LLM acts as a remediator agent to rewrite utterances violating norms for impr…

2024

Causal Discovery Inspired Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction

EMNLP 2024finding

This paper tackles the task of emotion-cause pair extraction in the unsupervised domain adaptation setting.The problem is challenging as the distributions of the events causing emotions in target domains are dramatically different than those in source domains, despite the distributions of emotional…

2024

Generative Region-Language Pretraining for Open-Ended Object Detection

CVPR 2024poster

In recent research significant attention has been devoted to the open-vocabulary object detection task aiming to generalize beyond the limited number of classes labeled during training and detect objects described by arbitrary category names at inference. Compared with conventional object detection…

2024

IMO: Greedy Layer-Wise Sparse Representation Learning for Out-of-Distribution Text Classification with Pre-trained Models

ACL 2024long

Machine learning models have made incredible progress, but they still struggle when applied to examples from unseen domains. This study focuses on a specific problem of domain generalization, where a model is trained on one source domain and tested on multiple target domains that are unseen during t…

2024

Mixture-of-Skills: Learning to Optimize Data Usage for Fine-Tuning Large Language Models

EMNLP 2024main

Large language models (LLMs) are typically fine-tuned on diverse and extensive datasets sourced from various origins to develop a comprehensive range of skills, such as writing, reasoning, chatting, coding, and more. Each skill has unique characteristics, and these datasets are often heterogeneous a…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

RENOVI: A Benchmark Towards Remediating Norm Violations in Socio-Cultural Conversations

NAACL 2024findings

Norm violations occur when individuals fail to conform to culturally accepted behaviors, which may lead to potential conflicts. Remediating norm violations requires social awareness and cultural sensitivity of the nuances at play. To equip interactive AI systems with a remediation ability, we offer…

2024

Revisiting Data Reconstruction Attacks on Real-world Dataset for Federated Natural Language Understanding

COLING 2024main

With the growing privacy concerns surrounding natural language understanding (NLU) applications, the need to train high-quality models while safeguarding data privacy has reached unprecedented importance. Federated learning (FL) offers a promising approach to collaborative model training by exchangi…

2024

Revisiting Deep Audio-Text Retrieval Through the Lens of Transportation

ICLR 2024poster

The Learning-to-match (LTM) framework proves to be an effective inverse optimal transport approach for learning the underlying ground metric between two sources of data, facilitating subsequent matching. However, the conventional LTM framework faces scalability challenges, necessitating the use of t…

2024

Towards Probing Speech-Specific Risks in Large Multimodal Models: A Taxonomy, Benchmark, and Insights

EMNLP 2024main

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have achieved great success recently, demonstrating a strong capability to understand multimodal information and to interact with human users. Despite the progress made, the challenge of detecting high-risk interactions in multimodal settings, and in particular in spee…

2023

Can ChatGPT Perform Reasoning Using the IRAC Method in Analyzing Legal Scenarios Like a Lawyer?

EMNLP 2023long findings

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have drawn a lot of attentions recently in the legal domain due to its emergent ability to tackle a variety of legal tasks. However, it is still unknown if LLMs are able to analyze a legal case and perform reasoning in the same manner as lawyers. Theref…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

FACTUAL: A Benchmark for Faithful and Consistent Textual Scene Graph Parsing

ACL 2023findings

Textual scene graph parsing has become increasingly important in various vision-language applications, including image caption evaluation and image retrieval. However, existing scene graph parsers that convert image captions into scene graphs often suffer from two types of errors. First, the generat…

2023

FEDLEGAL: The First Real-World Federated Learning Benchmark for Legal NLP

ACL 2023long

The inevitable private information in legal data necessitates legal artificial intelligence to study privacy-preserving and decentralized learning methods. Federated learning (FL) has merged as a promising technique for multiple participants to collaboratively train a shared model while efficiently…

2023

FaLA: Fast Linear Adaptation for Replacing Backbone Models on Edge Devices

EMNLP 2023long findings

In this work, we study the language model backbone replacement problem for personalized downstream tasks in a non-stationary on-device scenario. In real world, company may periodically update the knowledge and architectures of backbones to keep the competitive in the market, meanwhile, to accommodat…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

FedPETuning: When Federated Learning Meets the Parameter-Efficient Tuning Methods of Pre-trained Language Models

ACL 2023findings

With increasing concerns about data privacy, there is an increasing necessity of fine-tuning pre-trained language models (PLMs) for adapting to downstream tasks located in end-user devices or local clients without transmitting data to the central server. This urgent necessity therefore calls the res…

2023

Learning Object-Language Alignments for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

ICLR 2023poster

Existing object detection methods are bounded in a fixed-set vocabulary by costly labeled data. When dealing with novel categories, the model has to be retrained with more bounding box annotations. Natural language supervision is an attractive alternative for its annotation-free attributes and broad…

2023

The Best of Both Worlds: Combining Human and Machine Translations for Multilingual Semantic Parsing with Active Learning

ACL 2023long

Multilingual semantic parsing aims to leverage the knowledge from the high-resource languages to improve low-resource semantic parsing, yet commonly suffers from the data imbalance problem. Prior works propose to utilize the translations by either humans or machines to alleviate such issues. However…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2022

Federated Model Decomposition with Private Vocabulary for Text Classification

EMNLP 2022main

With the necessity of privacy protection, it becomes increasingly vital to train deep neural models in a federated learning manner for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, recent studies show eavesdroppers (i.e., dishonest servers) can still reconstruct the private input in federated le…

2022

Multimodal Transformer with Variable-Length Memory for Vision-and-Language Navigation

ECCV 2022poster

"Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is a task that an agent is required to follow a language instruction to navigate to the goal position, which relies on the ongoing interactions with the environment during moving. Recent Transformer-based VLN methods have made great progress benefiting from the…

2022

Student Surpasses Teacher: Imitation Attack for Black-Box NLP APIs

COLING 2022main

Machine-learning-as-a-service (MLaaS) has attracted millions of users to their splendid large-scale models. Although published as black-box APIs, the valuable models behind these services are still vulnerable to imitation attacks. Recently, a series of works have demonstrated that attackers manage t…

2022

Variational Autoencoder with Disentanglement Priors for Low-Resource Task-Specific Natural Language Generation

EMNLP 2022main

In this paper, we propose a variational autoencoder with disentanglement priors, VAE-Dprior, for task-specific natural language generation with none or a handful of task-specific labeled examples. In order to tackle compositional generalization across tasks, our model performs disentangled represent…

2021

Neural-Symbolic Commonsense Reasoner with Relation Predictors

ACL 2021short

Commonsense reasoning aims to incorporate sets of commonsense facts, retrieved from Commonsense Knowledge Graphs (CKG), to draw conclusion about ordinary situations. The dynamic nature of commonsense knowledge postulates models capable of performing multi-hop reasoning over new situations. This feat…

2021

Simple or Complex? Complexity-controllable Question Generation with Soft Templates and Deep Mixture of Experts Model

EMNLP 2021finding

The ability to generate natural-language questions with controlled complexity levels is highly desirable as it further expands the applicability of question generation. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end neural complexity-controllable question generation model, which incorporates a mixture of e…

Cited by 17SourcePDFScholar
2021

Total Recall: a Customized Continual Learning Method for Neural Semantic Parsers

EMNLP 2021main

This paper investigates continual learning for semantic parsing. In this setting, a neural semantic parser learns tasks sequentially without accessing full training data from previous tasks. Direct application of the SOTA continual learning algorithms to this problem fails to achieve comparable perf…

2020

CosMo: Conditional Seq2Seq-based Mixture Model for Zero-Shot Commonsense Question Answering

COLING 2020main

Commonsense reasoning refers to the ability of evaluating a social situation and acting accordingly. Identification of the implicit causes and effects of a social context is the driving capability which can enable machines to perform commonsense reasoning. The dynamic world of social interactions re…

2019

Maximal Divergence Sequential Autoencoder for Binary Software Vulnerability Detection

ICLR 2019poster

Due to the sharp increase in the severity of the threat imposed by software vulnerabilities, the detection of vulnerabilities in binary code has become an important concern in the software industry, such as the embedded systems industry, and in the field of computer security. However, most of the wo…

Cited by 64SourcePDFScholar
2017

Making Deep Neural Networks Robust to Label Noise: A Loss Correction Approach

CVPR 2017oral

We present a theoretically grounded approach to train deep neural networks, including recurrent networks, subject to class-dependent label noise. We propose two procedures for loss correction that are agnostic to both application domain and network architecture. They simply amount to at most a matri…

Cited by 1853PDFcodeScholar
2017

f-GANs in an Information Geometric Nutshell

NeurIPS 2017spotlight

Nowozin \textit{et al} showed last year how to extend the GAN \textit{principle} to all $f$-divergences. The approach is elegant but falls short of a full description of the supervised game, and says little about the key player, the generator: for example, what does the generator actually converge t…