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Wenxuan Zhang

64 accepted papers

2026

RAVENEA: A Benchmark for Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Visual Culture Understanding

ICLR 2026poster

As vision-language models (VLMs) become increasingly integrated into daily life, the need for accurate visual culture understanding is becoming critical. Yet, these models frequently fall short in interpreting cultural nuances effectively. Prior work has demonstrated the effectiveness of retrieval-a…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Scaling Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Tool-Integrated Reasoning in VLMs

CVPR 2026

While recent vision-language models (VLMs) demonstrate strong image understanding, their ability to "think with images," i.e., to reason through multi-step visual interactions, remains limited. We introduce VISTA-Gym, a scalable training environment for incentivizing tool-integrated visual reasoning

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

SpaCE-Eval: A Benchmark for Real-World Multi-Modal Reasoning

ICLR 2026poster

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) represent a significant advancement in artificial intelligence. Among the growing capabilities exhibited by MLLMs, abilities to understand and reason in real-world environments stand out as particularly vital as a fundamental prerequisite for a wide array of…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Training Data Efficiency in Multimodal Process Reward Models

ICML 2026poster

Multimodal Process Reward Models (MPRMs) are central to step-level supervision for visual reasoning in MLLMs. Training MPRMs typically requires large-scale Monte Carlo (MC)-annotated corpora, incurring substantial training cost. This paper studies the data efficiency for MPRM training. Our prelimina…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

dTRPO : Trajectory Reduction in Policy Optimization of Diffusion Large Language Models

ICML 2026poster

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) introduce a new paradigm for language generation and thus induce new challenges in aligning dLLMs for human preference. In this work, aim to optimize the dLLM generation process by developing a theoretical formulation and an efficient and effective quantificat…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Auto-Arena: Automating LLM Evaluations with Agent Peer Battles and Committee Discussions

ACL 2025long

As LLMs continuously evolve, there is an urgent need for a reliable evaluation method that delivers trustworthy results promptly. Currently, static benchmarks suffer from inflexibility and unreliability, leading users to prefer human voting platforms like Chatbot Arena. However, human evaluations re…

2025

Bi-Factorial Preference Optimization: Balancing Safety-Helpfulness in Language Models

ICLR 2025spotlight

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on human preferences, typically through reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), has proven successful in enhancing their capabilities. However, ensuring the safety of LLMs during fine-tuning remains a critical concern, and mitigating the potentia…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2025

Disentangling Language and Culture for Evaluating Multilingual Large Language Models

ACL 2025long

This paper introduces a Dual Evaluation Framework to comprehensively assess the multilingual capabilities of LLMs. By decomposing the evaluation along the dimensions of linguistic medium and cultural context, this framework enables a nuanced analysis of LLMs’ ability to process questions within both…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

FACT-AUDIT: An Adaptive Multi-Agent Framework for Dynamic Fact-Checking Evaluation of Large Language Models

ACL 2025long

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the fact-checking studies. However, existing automated fact-checking evaluation methods rely on static datasets and classification metrics, which fail to automatically evaluate the justification production and uncover the nuanced limitations o…

2025

Is Translation All You Need? A Study on Solving Multilingual Tasks with Large Language Models

NAACL 2025long

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated multilingual capabilities, yet they are mostly English-centric due to the imbalanced training corpora. While prior works have leveraged this bias to enhance multilingual performance through translation, they have been largely limited to natural language…

2025

JsonTuning: Towards Generalizable, Robust, and Controllable Instruction Tuning

ACL 2025finding

Instruction tuning is vital for enhancing the performance of large language models (LLMs), but existing text-to-text methods, referred to as TextTuning, struggle with issues such as generalization, robustness, and controllability due to their lack of explicit task structures. We introduce JsonTuning…

2025

Knowledge Boundary of Large Language Models: A Survey

ACL 2025long

Although large language models (LLMs) store vast amount of knowledge in their parameters, they still have limitations in the memorization and utilization of certain knowledge, leading to undesired behaviors such as generating untruthful and inaccurate responses. This highlights the critical need to…

2025

MPO: Multilingual Safety Alignment via Reward Gap Optimization

ACL 2025long

Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly central to AI applications worldwide, necessitating robust multilingual safety alignment to ensure secure deployment across diverse linguistic contexts. Existing preference learning methods for safety alignment, such as RLHF and DPO, are primaril…

2025

MlingConf: A Comprehensive Study of Multilingual Confidence Estimation on Large Language Models

ACL 2025finding

The tendency of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate hallucinations raises concerns regarding their reliability. Therefore, confidence estimations indicating the extent of trustworthiness of the generations become essential. However, current LLM confidence estimations in languages other than Eng…

2025

Pruning General Large Language Models into Customized Expert Models

ACL 2025finding

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed natural language processing, yet their substantial model sizes often demand significant computational resources. To preserve computing resources and accelerate inference speed, it is crucial to prune redundant parameters, especially for experienced users…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Query-based Knowledge Transfer for Heterogeneous Learning Environments

ICLR 2025poster

Decentralized collaborative learning under data heterogeneity and privacy constraints has rapidly advanced. However, existing solutions like federated learning, ensembles, and transfer learning, often fail to adequately serve the unique needs of clients, especially when local data representation i…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Reframe Your Life Story: Interactive Narrative Therapist and Innovative Moment Assessment with Large Language Models

EMNLP 2025

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has opened new possibilities for mental health support, yet current approaches lack realism in simulating specialized psychotherapy and fail to capture therapeutic progression over time. Narrative therapy, which helps individuals transform problematic

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

SeaExam and SeaBench: Benchmarking LLMs with Local Multilingual Questions in Southeast Asia

NAACL 2025findings

This study introduces two novel benchmarks, SeaExam and SeaBench, designed to evaluate the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Southeast Asian (SEA) application scenarios. Unlike existing multilingual datasets primarily derived from English translations, these benchmarks are constructed…

2025

SeaLLMs 3: Open Foundation and Chat Multilingual Large Language Models for Southeast Asian Languages

NAACL 2025system demonstrations

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable abilities across various tasks, yet their development has predominantly centered on high-resource languages like English and Chinese, leaving low-resource languages underserved. To address this disparity, we present SeaLLMs 3, the latest iteration o…

2025

StyleGuard: Preventing Text-to-Image-Model-based Style Mimicry Attacks by Style Perturbations

NeurIPS 2025poster

Recently, text-to-image diffusion models have been widely used for style mimicry and personalized customization through methods such as DreamBooth and Textual Inversion. This has raised concerns about intellectual property protection and the generation of deceptive content. Recent studies, such as G…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

The Emergence of Abstract Thought in Large Language Models Beyond Any Language

NeurIPS 2025poster

As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, their capacity to function effectively across a diverse range of languages has shown marked improvement. Preliminary studies observe that the hidden activations of LLMs often resemble English, even when responding to non-English prompts. This has…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

The Rise of Parameter Specialization for Knowledge Storage in Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Over time, a growing wave of large language models from various series has been introduced to the community. Researchers are striving to maximize the performance of language models with constrained parameter sizes. However, from a microscopic perspective, there has been limited research on how to be…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Understanding and Enhancing Safety Mechanisms of LLMs via Safety-Specific Neuron

ICLR 2025poster

Safety alignment for large language models (LLMs) has become a critical issue due to their rapid progress. However, our understanding of effective safety mechanisms in LLMs remains limited, leading to safety alignment training that mainly focuses on improving optimization, data-level enhancement, or…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Vgent: Graph-based Retrieval-Reasoning-Augmented Generation For Long Video Understanding

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Understanding and reasoning over long videos pose significant challenges for large video language models (LVLMs) due to the difficulty in processing intensive video tokens beyond context window and retaining long-term sequential information. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has demonstrated effe…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

When Less Language is More: Language-Reasoning Disentanglement Makes LLMs Better Multilingual Reasoners

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Multilingual reasoning remains a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs), with performance disproportionately favoring high-resource languages. Drawing inspiration from cognitive neuroscience, which suggests that human reasoning functions largely independently of language processing,…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Zero-to-Strong Generalization: Eliciting Strong Capabilities of Large Language Models Iteratively without Gold Labels

COLING 2025main

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance through supervised fine-tuning or in-context learning using gold labels. However, this paradigm is limited by the availability of gold labels, while in certain scenarios, LLMs may need to perform tasks that are too complex for hum…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

ARFA: An Asymmetric Receptive Field Autoencoder Model for Spatiotemporal Prediction

ICASSP 2024accepted

Spatiotemporal prediction aims to generate future sequences by paradigms learned from historical contexts. It is essential in numerous domains, such as traffic flow prediction and weather forecasting. Recently, research in this field has been predominantly driven by deep neural networks based on aut…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Continual Learning on a Diet: Learning from Sparsely Labeled Streams Under Constrained Computation

ICLR 2024poster

We propose and study a realistic Continual Learning (CL) setting where learning algorithms are granted a restricted computational budget per time step while training. We apply this setting to large-scale semi-supervised Continual Learning scenarios with sparse label rate. Previous proficient CL met…

2024

DimA: A Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning Method with Knowledge Transfer Based on Transformer

COLING 2024main

Fine-tuning is a widely used technique for leveraging pre-trained language models (PLMs) in downstream tasks, but it can be computationally expensive and storage-intensive. To address this challenge, researchers have developed parameter-efficient methods that balance performance and resource cost. H…

2024

How do Large Language Models Handle Multilingualism?

NeurIPS 2024poster

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across diverse languages. This study explores how LLMs handle multilingualism. Based on observed language ratio shifts among layers and the relationships between network structures and certain capabilities, we hypothesize the LLM…

2024

Label Delay in Online Continual Learning

NeurIPS 2024poster

Online continual learning, the process of training models on streaming data, has gained increasing attention in recent years. However, a critical aspect often overlooked is the label delay, where new data may not be labeled due to slow and costly annotation processes. We introduce a new continual le…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

Multilingual Jailbreak Challenges in Large Language Models

ICLR 2024poster

While large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks, they pose potential safety concerns, such as the ``jailbreak'' problem, wherein malicious instructions can manipulate LLMs to exhibit undesirable behavior. Although several preventive measures have been…

2024

On the Multi-turn Instruction Following for Conversational Web Agents

ACL 2024long

Web agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in planning and executing multi-step interactions within complex web-based environments, fulfilling a wide range of web navigation tasks. Despite these advancements, the potential for LLM-powered agents to effe…

2024

Order-Agnostic Data Augmentation for Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition

ACL 2024long

Data augmentation (DA) methods have been proven to be effective for pre-trained language models (PLMs) in low-resource settings, including few-shot named entity recognition (NER). However, existing NER DA techniques either perform rule-based manipulations on words that break the semantic coherence o…

2024

Overcoming Generic Knowledge Loss with Selective Parameter Update

CVPR 2024poster

Foundation models encompass an extensive knowledge base and offer remarkable transferability. However this knowledge becomes outdated or insufficient over time. The challenge lies in continuously updating foundation models to accommodate novel information while retaining their original capabilities.…

2024

Plug-and-Play Policy Planner for Large Language Model Powered Dialogue Agents

ICLR 2024poster

Proactive dialogues serve as a practical yet challenging dialogue problem in the era of large language models (LLMs), where the dialogue policy planning is the key to improving the proactivity of LLMs. Most existing studies enable the dialogue policy planning of LLMs using various prompting schemes…

2024

SeaLLMs - Large Language Models for Southeast Asia

ACL 2024system demonstrations

Despite the remarkable achievements of large language models (LLMs) in various tasks, there remains a linguistic bias that favors high-resource languages, such as English, often at the expense of low-resource and regional languages. To address this imbalance, we introduce SeaLLMs, an innovative seri…

2024

Sentiment Analysis in the Era of Large Language Models: A Reality Check

NAACL 2024findings

Sentiment analysis (SA) has been a long-standing research area in natural language processing. With the recent advent of large language models (LLMs), there is great potential for their employment on SA problems. However, the extent to which current LLMs can be leveraged for different sentiment anal…

2023

AQE: Argument Quadruplet Extraction via a Quad-Tagging Augmented Generative Approach

ACL 2023findings

Argument mining involves multiple sub-tasks that automatically identify argumentative elements, such as claim detection, evidence extraction, stance classification, etc. However, each subtask alone is insufficient for a thorough understanding of the argumentative structure and reasoning process. To…

2023

Bidirectional Generative Framework for Cross-domain Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

ACL 2023long

Cross-domain aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) aims to perform various fine-grained sentiment analysis tasks on a target domain by transferring knowledge from a source domain. Since labeled data only exists in the source domain, a model is expected to bridge the domain gap for tackling cross-do…

2023

Continual Zero-Shot Learning through Semantically Guided Generative Random Walks

ICCV 2023poster

Learning novel concepts, remembering previous knowledge, and adapting it to future tasks occur simultaneously throughout a human's lifetime. To model such comprehensive abilities, continual zero-shot learning (CZSL) has recently been introduced. However, most existing methods overused the unseen sem…

Cited by 6PDFcodeScholar
2023

From Cloze to Comprehension: Retrofitting Pre-trained Masked Language Models to Pre-trained Machine Reader

NeurIPS 2023poster

We present Pre-trained Machine Reader (PMR), a novel method for retrofitting pre-trained masked language models (MLMs) to pre-trained machine reading comprehension (MRC) models without acquiring labeled data. PMR can resolve the discrepancy between model pre-training and downstream fine-tuning of ex…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2023

Knowledge-enhanced Mixed-initiative Dialogue System for Emotional Support Conversations

ACL 2023long

Unlike empathetic dialogues, the system in emotional support conversations (ESC) is expected to not only convey empathy for comforting the help-seeker, but also proactively assist in exploring and addressing their problems during the conversation. In this work, we study the problem of mixed-initiati…

2023

M3Exam: A Multilingual, Multimodal, Multilevel Benchmark for Examining Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2023poster

Despite the existence of various benchmarks for evaluating natural language processing models, we argue that human exams are a more suitable means of evaluating general intelligence for large language models (LLMs), as they inherently demand a much wider range of abilities such as language understan…

2023

SLAMB: Accelerated Large Batch Training with Sparse Communication

ICML 2023poster

Distributed training of large deep neural networks requires frequent exchange of massive data between machines, thus communication efficiency is a major concern. Existing compressed communication methods are either not compatible with large batch optimization algorithms, or do not provide sufficient…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2023

SOUL: Towards Sentiment and Opinion Understanding of Language

EMNLP 2023short main

Sentiment analysis is a well-established natural language processing task, with sentiment polarity classification being one of its most popular and representative tasks. However, despite the success of pre-trained language models in this area, they often fall short of capturing the broader complexit…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

SadTalker: Learning Realistic 3D Motion Coefficients for Stylized Audio-Driven Single Image Talking Face Animation

CVPR 2023poster

Generating talking head videos through a face image and a piece of speech audio still contains many challenges. i.e., unnatural head movement, distorted expression, and identity modification. We argue that these issues are mainly caused by learning from the coupled 2D motion fields. On the other han…

2023

Zero-Shot Text Classification via Self-Supervised Tuning

ACL 2023findings

Existing solutions to zero-shot text classification either conduct prompting with pre-trained language models, which is sensitive to the choices of templates, or rely on large-scale annotated data of relevant tasks for meta-tuning. In this work, we propose a new paradigm based on self-supervised lea…

2022

PACIFIC: Towards Proactive Conversational Question Answering over Tabular and Textual Data in Finance

EMNLP 2022main

To facilitate conversational question answering (CQA) over hybrid contexts in finance, we present a new dataset, named PACIFIC. Compared with existing CQA datasets, PACIFIC exhibits three key features: (i) proactivity, (ii) numerical reasoning, and (iii) hybrid context of tables and text. A new task…

2022

Seeking Patterns, Not just Memorizing Procedures: Contrastive Learning for Solving Math Word Problems

ACL 2022findings

Math Word Problem (MWP) solving needs to discover the quantitative relationships over natural language narratives. Recent work shows that existing models memorize procedures from context and rely on shallow heuristics to solve MWPs. In this paper, we look at this issue and argue that the cause is a…

2022

Towards Generalizable and Robust Text-to-SQL Parsing

EMNLP 2022finding

Text-to-SQL parsing tackles the problem of mapping natural language questions to executable SQL queries. In practice, text-to-SQL parsers often encounter various challenging scenarios, requiring them to be generalizable and robust. While most existing work addresses a particular generalization or ro…

2022

UniGDD: A Unified Generative Framework for Goal-Oriented Document-Grounded Dialogue

ACL 2022short

The goal-oriented document-grounded dialogue aims at responding to the user query based on the dialogue context and supporting document. Existing studies tackle this problem by decomposing it into two sub-tasks: knowledge identification and response generation. However, such pipeline methods would u…

2021

Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction as Paraphrase Generation

EMNLP 2021main

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) has been extensively studied in recent years, which typically involves four fundamental sentiment elements, including the aspect category, aspect term, opinion term, and sentiment polarity. Existing studies usually consider the detection of partial sentiment el…

2021

Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis in Question Answering Forums

EMNLP 2021finding

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) typically focuses on extracting aspects and predicting their sentiments on individual sentences such as customer reviews. Recently, another kind of opinion sharing platform, namely question answering (QA) forum, has received increasing popularity, which accumul…

2021

Cross-lingual Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis with Aspect Term Code-Switching

EMNLP 2021main

Many efforts have been made in solving the Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) task. While most existing studies focus on English texts, handling ABSA in resource-poor languages remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we consider the unsupervised cross-lingual transfer for the ABSA task, wh…

2021

Towards Generative Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

ACL 2021short

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) has received increasing attention recently. Most existing work tackles ABSA in a discriminative manner, designing various task-specific classification networks for the prediction. Despite their effectiveness, these methods ignore the rich label semantics in ABS…

2020

Intra-/Inter-Interaction Network with Latent Interaction Modeling for Multi-turn Response Selection

COLING 2020main

Multi-turn response selection has been extensively studied and applied to many real-world applications in recent years. However, current methods typically model the interactions between multi-turn utterances and candidate responses with iterative approaches, which is not practical as the turns of co…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar