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Wayne Xin Zhao

44 accepted papers

2026

Improving Vision-language Models with Perception-centric Process Reward Models

CVPR 2026

Recent advancements in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) have significantly improved the complex reasoning ability of vision-language models (VLMs). However, its outcome-level supervision is too coarse to diagnose and correct errors within the reasoning chain. To this end, we pro

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Revisiting the Necessity of Lengthy Chain-of-Thought in Vision-centric Reasoning Generalization

CVPR 2026

We study how different Chain-of-Thought (CoT) designs affect the acquisition of the generalizable visual reasoning ability in vision-language models (VLMs). While CoT data, especially long or visual CoT such as "think with image", has been widely used to supervise intermediate reasoning, it remains

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

A Pre-trained Plug-in Mixture-of-LoRAs Model for Transferable Sequential Recommendation

ICASSP 2025accepted

The goal of transferable sequential recommendation (TSR) is to improve the performance of sequential recommenders in multiple target domains leveraging knowledge transferred from source domains. Most existing transferable sequential recommenders rely on item modality information but pay insufficient…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

CAFE: Retrieval Head-based Coarse-to-Fine Information Seeking to Enhance Multi-Document QA Capability

EMNLP 2025

Advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have extended their input context length, yet they still struggle with retrieval and reasoning in long-context inputs. Existing methods propose to utilize the prompt strategy and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to alleviate this limitation. However,

2025

Enhancing Chain-of-Thought Reasoning via Neuron Activation Differential Analysis

EMNLP 2025

Despite the impressive chain-of-thought(CoT) reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs), its underlying mechanisms remains unclear. In this paper, we explore the inner workings of LLM’s CoT ability via the lens of neurons in the feed-forward layers. We propose an efficient method to identify

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Extracting and Combining Abilities For Building Multi-lingual Ability-enhanced Large Language Models

EMNLP 2025

Multi-lingual ability transfer has become increasingly important for the broad application of large language models (LLMs). Existing work highly relies on training with the multi-lingual ability-related data, which may not be available for low-resource languages. To solve it, we propose a **M**ulti-

2025

Investigating the Factual Knowledge Boundary of Large Language Models with Retrieval Augmentation

COLING 2025main

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive prowess in solving a wide range of tasks with world knowledge. However, it remains unclear how well LLMs are able to perceive their factual knowledge boundaries, particularly under retrieval augmentation settings. In this study, we present the first…

2025

ManuSearch: Democratizing Deep Search in Large Language Models with a Transparent and Open Multi-Agent Framework

EMNLP 2025

Recent advances in web-augmented large language models (LLMs) have exhibited strong performance in complex reasoning tasks, yet these capabilities are mostly locked in proprietary systems with opaque architectures. In this work, we propose ManuSearch , a transparent and modular multi-agent framework

2025

On Domain-Adaptive Post-Training for Multimodal Large Language Models

EMNLP 2025

Adapting general multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to specific domains, such as scientific and industrial fields, is highly significant in promoting their practical applications. This paper systematically investigates domain adaptation of MLLMs via post-training, focusing on data synthesis, t

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

SimpleDeepSearcher: Deep Information Seeking via Web-Powered Reasoning Trajectory Synthesis

EMNLP 2025

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems have advanced large language models (LLMs) in complex deep search scenarios requiring multi-step reasoning and iterative information retrieval. However, existing approaches face critical limitations that lack high-quality training trajectories or suffer f

2025

Smart-Searcher: Incentivizing the Dynamic Knowledge Acquisition of LLMs via Reinforcement Learning

EMNLP 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful but prone to hallucinations due to static knowledge. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) helps by injecting external information, but current methods often are costly, generalize poorly, or ignore the model’s internal knowledge.In this paper, we introduce S

2025

Sticker-TTS: Learn to Utilize Historical Experience with a Sticker-driven Test-Time Scaling Framework

EMNLP 2025

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have exhibited strong performance on complex reasoning tasks, with further gains achievable through increased computational budgets at inference. However, current test-time scaling methods predominantly rely on redundant sampling, ignoring the historical experience util

2025

Unleashing the Potential of Large Language Models as Prompt Optimizers: Analogical Analysis with Gradient-based Model Optimizers

AAAI 2025technical

Automatic prompt optimization is an important approach to improving the performance of large language models (LLMs). Recent research demonstrates the potential of using LLMs as prompt optimizers, which can generate improved task prompts via iterative refinement. In this paper, we propose a novel per…

2025

ViFT: Towards Visual Instruction-Free Fine-tuning for Large Vision-Language Models

EMNLP 2025

Visual instruction tuning has become the predominant technology in eliciting the multimodal task-solving capabilities of large vision-language models (LVLMs). Despite the success, as visual instructions require images as the input, it would leave the gap in inheriting the task-solving capabilities f

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

What Makes for Good Visual Instructions? Synthesizing Complex Visual Reasoning Instructions for Visual Instruction Tuning

COLING 2025main

Visual instruction tuning is crucial for enhancing the zero-shot generalization capability of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs). In this paper, we aim to investigate a fundamental question: “what makes for good visual instructions”. Through a comprehensive empirical study, we find that instr…

2024

BAMBOO: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Long Text Modeling Capacities of Large Language Models

COLING 2024main

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved dramatic proficiency over NLP tasks with normal length. Recently, multiple studies have committed to extending the context length and enhancing the long text modeling capabilities of LLMs. To comprehensively evaluate the long context ability of LLMs, we pro…

2024

ChainLM: Empowering Large Language Models with Improved Chain-of-Thought Prompting

COLING 2024main

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting can enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), establishing itself as a primary approach to solving complex reasoning tasks. Existing CoT synthesis approaches usually focus on simpler reasoning tasks and thus result in low-quality and inconsi…

2024

Do Emergent Abilities Exist in Quantized Large Language Models: An Empirical Study

COLING 2024main

Despite the superior performance, Large Language Models (LLMs) require significant computational resources for deployment and use. To overcome this issue, quantization methods have been widely applied to reduce the memory footprint of LLMs as well as increase the inference rate. However, a major cha…

2024

Enhancing Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning with Simple Calibration Based on Stable Rank

COLING 2024main

Lightweight fine-tuning is widely used as an important technique for efficiently adapting pre-trained language models (PLM) to downstream tasks. Despite the reduction in trainable parameters, existing lightweight fine-tuning methods are found to be effective in low-resource settings but often fail i…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Images are Achilles' Heel of Alignment: Exploiting Visual Vulnerabilities for Jailbreaking Multimodal Large Language Models

ECCV 2024oral

"In this paper, we study the harmlessness alignment problem of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). We conduct a systematic empirical analysis of the harmlessness performance of representative MLLMs and reveal that the image input poses the alignment vulnerability of MLLMs. Inspired by this, we…

2023

Continuous Trajectory Generation Based on Two-Stage GAN

AAAI 2023technical

Simulating the human mobility and generating large-scale trajectories are of great use in many real-world applications, such as urban planning, epidemic spreading analysis, and geographic privacy protect. Although many previous works have studied the problem of trajectory generation, the continuity…

Cited by 51SourcePDFScholar
2023

Diffusion Models for Non-autoregressive Text Generation: A Survey

IJCAI 2023poster

Non-autoregressive (NAR) text generation has attracted much attention in the field of natural language processing, which greatly reduces the inference latency but has to sacrifice the generation accuracy. Recently, diffusion models, a class of latent variable generative models, have been introduced…

2023

Learning to Imagine: Visually-Augmented Natural Language Generation

ACL 2023long

People often imagine relevant scenes to aid in the writing process. In this work, we aim to utilize visual information for composition in the same manner as humans. We propose a method, LIVE, that makes pre-trained language models (PLMs) Learn to Imagine for Visually-augmented natural language gEner…

2023

MVP: Multi-task Supervised Pre-training for Natural Language Generation

ACL 2023findings

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved remarkable success in natural language generation (NLG) tasks. Up to now, most NLG-oriented PLMs are pre-trained in an unsupervised manner using the large-scale general corpus. In the meanwhile, an increasing number of models pre-trained with labeled…

2023

PDFormer: Propagation Delay-Aware Dynamic Long-Range Transformer for Traffic Flow Prediction

AAAI 2023technical

As a core technology of Intelligent Transportation System, traffic flow prediction has a wide range of applications. The fundamental challenge in traffic flow prediction is to effectively model the complex spatial-temporal dependencies in traffic data. Spatial-temporal Graph Neural Network (GNN) mod…

2023

Small Pre-trained Language Models Can be Fine-tuned as Large Models via Over-Parameterization

ACL 2023long

By scaling the model size, large pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown remarkable performance in various natural language processing tasks, mostly outperforming small PLMs by a large margin. However, due to the high computational cost, the huge number of parameters also restricts the applica…

2023

TOME: A Two-stage Approach for Model-based Retrieval

ACL 2023long

Recently, model-based retrieval has emerged as a new paradigm in text retrieval that discards the index in the traditional retrieval model and instead memorizes the candidate corpora using model parameters. This design employs a sequence-to-sequence paradigm to generate document identifiers, which e…

2023

The Web Can Be Your Oyster for Improving Language Models

ACL 2023findings

Pretrained language models (PLMs) encode a large amount of world knowledge. However, as such knowledge is frozen at the time of model training, the models become static and limited by the training data at that time. In order to further improve the capacity of PLMs for knowledge-intensive tasks, we c…

2023

Visually-augmented pretrained language models for NLP tasks without images

ACL 2023long

Although pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown impressive performance by text-only self-supervised training, they are found lack of visual semantics or commonsense. Existing solutions often rely on explicit images for visual knowledge augmentation (requiring time-consuming retrieval or gener…

2023

Zero-shot Visual Question Answering with Language Model Feedback

ACL 2023findings

In this paper, we propose a novel language model guided captioning approach, LAMOC, for knowledge-based visual question answering (VQA). Our approach employs the generated captions by a captioning model as the context of an answer prediction model, which is a Pre-Trained Language model (PLM). As the…

2022

Context-Tuning: Learning Contextualized Prompts for Natural Language Generation

COLING 2022main

Recently, pretrained language models (PLMs) have had exceptional success in language generation. To leverage the rich knowledge encoded by PLMs, a simple yet powerful paradigm is to use prompts in the form of either discrete tokens or continuous embeddings. In existing studies, these prompting metho…

2022

ELMER: A Non-Autoregressive Pre-trained Language Model for Efficient and Effective Text Generation

EMNLP 2022main

We study the text generation task under the approach of pre-trained language models (PLMs). Typically, an auto-regressive (AR) method is adopted for generating texts in a token-by-token manner. Despite many advantages of AR generation, it usually suffers from inefficient inference. Therefore, non-au…

2022

Parameter-Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Architecture for Pre-trained Language Models

COLING 2022main

Recently, Mixture-of-Experts (short as MoE) architecture has achieved remarkable success in increasing the model capacity of large-scale language models. However, MoE requires incorporating significantly more parameters than the base model being extended. In this paper, we propose building a paramet…

2022

SimANS: Simple Ambiguous Negatives Sampling for Dense Text Retrieval

EMNLP 2022industry

Sampling proper negatives from a large document pool is vital to effectively train a dense retrieval model. However, existing negative sampling strategies suffer from the uninformative or false negative problem. In this work, we empirically show that according to the measured relevance scores, the n…

2021

A Pretraining Numerical Reasoning Model for Ordinal Constrained Question Answering on Knowledge Base

EMNLP 2021finding

Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) is to answer natural language questions posed over knowledge bases (KBs). This paper targets at empowering the IR-based KBQA models with the ability of numerical reasoning for answering ordinal constrained questions. A major challenge is the lack of explicit…

2021

A Survey on Complex Knowledge Base Question Answering: Methods, Challenges and Solutions

IJCAI 2021poster

Knowledge base question answering (KBQA) aims to answer a question over a knowledge base (KB). Recently, a large number of studies focus on semantically or syntactically complicated questions. In this paper, we elaborately summarize the typical challenges and solutions for complex KBQA. We begin wi…

Cited by 228SourcePDFScholar
2021

Dual Sparse Attention Network For Session-based Recommendation

AAAI 2021technical

Session-based Recommendations recommend the next possible item for the user with anonymous sessions, whose challenge is that the user’s behavioral preference can only be analyzed in a limited sequence to meet their need. Recent advances evaluate the effectiveness of the attention mechanism in the se…

2021

Enabling Lightweight Fine-tuning for Pre-trained Language Model Compression based on Matrix Product Operators

ACL 2021long

This paper presents a novel pre-trained language models (PLM) compression approach based on the matrix product operator (short as MPO) from quantum many-body physics. It can decompose an original matrix into central tensors (containing the core information) and auxiliary tensors (with only a small p…

2021

RocketQA: An Optimized Training Approach to Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering

NAACL 2021long

In open-domain question answering, dense passage retrieval has become a new paradigm to retrieve relevant passages for finding answers. Typically, the dual-encoder architecture is adopted to learn dense representations of questions and passages for semantic matching. However, it is difficult to effe…

2021

RocketQAv2: A Joint Training Method for Dense Passage Retrieval and Passage Re-ranking

EMNLP 2021main

In various natural language processing tasks, passage retrieval and passage re-ranking are two key procedures in finding and ranking relevant information. Since both the two procedures contribute to the final performance, it is important to jointly optimize them in order to achieve mutual improvemen…

2021

Virtual Data Augmentation: A Robust and General Framework for Fine-tuning Pre-trained Models

EMNLP 2021main

Recent works have shown that powerful pre-trained language models (PLM) can be fooled by small perturbations or intentional attacks. To solve this issue, various data augmentation techniques are proposed to improve the robustness of PLMs. However, it is still challenging to augment semantically rele…

2020

Towards Topic-Guided Conversational Recommender System

COLING 2020main

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) aim to recommend high-quality items to users through interactive conversations. To develop an effective CRS, the support of high-quality datasets is essential. Existing CRS datasets mainly focus on immediate requests from users, while lack proactive guidance…