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Tianhua Zhang

10 accepted papers

2026

EmotionThinker: Prosody-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Explainable Speech Emotion Reasoning

ICLR 2026oral

Emotional information in speech plays a unique role in multimodal perception. However, current Speech Large Language Models (SpeechLLMs), similar to conventional speech emotion recognition (SER) systems, still treat emotion understanding as a simple classification problem. This provides limited inte…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

MMSU: A Massive Multi-task Spoken Language Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark

ICLR 2026poster

Speech inherently contains rich acoustic information that extends far beyond the textual language. In real-world spoken communication, effective interpretation often requires integrating semantic meaning (e.g., content), paralinguistic features (e.g., emotions, speed, pitch) and phonological charact…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Whispering Agents: A Event-Driven Covert Communication Protocol for the Internet of Agents

AAAI 2026technical

The emergence of the Internet of Agents (IoA) introduces critical challenges for communication privacy in sensitive, high-stakes domains. While standard Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocols secure message content, they are not designed to protect the act of communication itself, leaving agents vulnerable

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Decoding on Graphs: Faithful and Sound Reasoning on Knowledge Graphs through Generation of Well-Formed Chains

ACL 2025long

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) can serve as reliable knowledge sources for question answering (QA) due to their structured representation of knowledge. Existing research on the utilization of KG for large language models (LLMs) prevalently relies on subgraph retriever or iterative prompting, overlooking the…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Generate, Discriminate, Evolve: Enhancing Context Faithfulness via Fine-Grained Sentence-Level Self-Evolution

ACL 2025finding

Improving context faithfulness in large language models is essential for developing trustworthy retrieval augmented generation systems and mitigating hallucinations, especially in long-form question answering (LFQA) tasks or scenarios involving knowledge conflicts. Existing methods either intervene…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

RAG-Zeval: Enhancing RAG Responses Evaluator through End-to-End Reasoning and Ranking-Based Reinforcement Learning

EMNLP 2025

Robust evaluation is critical for deploying trustworthy retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. However, current LLM-based evaluation frameworks predominantly rely on directly prompting resource-intensive models with complex multi-stage prompts, underutilizing models’ reasoning capabilities an

2025

Self-DC: When to Reason and When to Act? Self Divide-and-Conquer for Compositional Unknown Questions

NAACL 2025long

Previous research has typically concentrated on leveraging the internal knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs) to answer known questions (i.e., internal reasoning such as generate-then-read). In contrast, for questions that fall outside their known scope, these models rely on external knowledge r…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2024

Adaptive Query Rewriting: Aligning Rewriters through Marginal Probability of Conversational Answers

EMNLP 2024main

Query rewriting is a crucial technique for passage retrieval in open-domain conversational question answering (CQA). It decontexualizes conversational queries into self-contained questions suitable for off-the-shelf retrievers. Existing methods attempt to incorporate retriever’s preference during th…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Natural Language Embedded Programs for Hybrid Language Symbolic Reasoning

NAACL 2024findings

How can we perform computations over natural language representations to solve tasks that require symbolic and numeric reasoning? We propose natural language embedded programs (NLEP) as a unifying framework for addressing math/symbolic reasoning, natural language understanding, and instruction follo…

2023

Search Augmented Instruction Learning

EMNLP 2023long findings

Large language models (LLMs) have been significantly improved by instruction fine-tuning, but still lack transparency and the ability to utilize up-to-date knowledge and information. In this work, we propose search-augmented instruction learning (SAIL), which grounds the language generation and inst…

Cited by 0SourceScholar