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Xiaoqing Zheng

41 accepted papers

2026

Biologically Plausible Learning via Bidirectional Spike-Based Distillation

ICLR 2026poster

Developing biologically plausible learning algorithms that can achieve performance comparable to error backpropagation remains a longstanding challenge. Existing approaches often compromise biological plausibility by entirely avoiding the use of spikes for error propagation or relying on both positi…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Explainable Synthetic Image Detection Through Diffusion Timestep Ensembling

AAAI 2026technical

Recent advances in diffusion models have enabled the creation of deceptively real images, posing significant security risks when misused. In this study, we empirically show that different timesteps of DDIM inversion reveal varying subtle distinctions between synthetic and real images that are extrac

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Frequency Matching in Spiking Neural Networks for mmWave Sensing

ICML 2026poster

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) sensing enables privacy-preserving, always-on edge perception, but its measurements are often sparse, temporally irregular, and corrupted by high-frequency noise. Existing mmWave pipelines predominantly rely on artificial neural networks (ANNs), which achieve robustness thro…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

RECAST: Expanding the Boundaries of LLMs' Complex Instruction Following with Multi-Constraint Data

ICLR 2026poster

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly expected to tackle complex tasks, driven by their expanding applications and users' growing proficiency in crafting sophisticated prompts. However, as the number of explicitly stated requirements increases (particularly more than $10$ constraints), LLMs…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Beyond Single Labels: Improving Conversational Recommendation through LLM-Powered Data Augmentation

ACL 2025long

Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) enhance recommendation quality by engaging users in multi-turn dialogues, capturing nuanced preferences through natural language interactions. However, these systems often face the false negative issue, where items that a user might like are incorrectly labe…

2025

Chain-of-Model Learning for Language Model

NeurIPS 2025poster

In this paper, we propose a novel learning paradigm, termed *Chain-of-Model* (CoM), which incorporates the causal relationship into the hidden states of each layer as a chain style. thereby introducing great scaling efficiency in model training and inference flexibility in deployment.We introduce th…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Cost-Effective On-Device Sequential Recommendation with Spiking Neural Networks

IJCAI 2025

On-device sequential recommendation (SR) systems are designed to make local inferences using real-time features, thereby alleviating the communication burden on server-based recommenders when handling concurrent requests from millions of users. However, the resource constraints of edge devices, incl

2025

Dendritic Localized Learning: Toward Biologically Plausible Algorithm

ICML 2025poster

Backpropagation is the foundational algorithm for training neural networks and a key driver of deep learning's success. However, its biological plausibility has been challenged due to three primary limitations: weight symmetry, reliance on global error signals, and the dual-phase nature of training,…

2025

ECC-SNN: Cost-Effective Edge-Cloud Collaboration for Spiking Neural Networks

IJCAI 2025

Most edge-cloud collaboration frameworks rely on the substantial computational and storage capabilities of cloud-based artificial neural networks (ANNs). However, this reliance results in significant communication overhead between edge devices and the cloud, as well as high computational energy cons

2025

Enhancing Model Privacy in Federated Learning with Random Masking and Quantization

EMNLP 2025

The primary goal of traditional federated learning is to protect data privacy by enabling distributed edge devices to collaboratively train a shared global model while keeping raw data decentralized at local clients. The rise of large language models (LLMs) has introduced new challenges in distribut

2025

FastMCTS: A Simple Sampling Strategy for Data Synthesis

ACL 2025long

Synthetic high-quality multi-step reasoning data can significantly enhance the performance of large language models on various tasks. However, most existing methods rely on rejection sampling, which generates trajectories independently and suffers from inefficiency and imbalanced sampling across pro…

2025

Improving Continual Pre-training Through Seamless Data Packing

ACL 2025finding

Continual pre-training has demonstrated significant potential in enhancing model performance, particularly in domain-specific scenarios. The most common approach for packing data before continual pre-training involves concatenating input texts and splitting them into fixed-length sequences. While st…

2025

Revisiting Jailbreaking for Large Language Models: A Representation Engineering Perspective

COLING 2025main

The recent surge in jailbreaking attacks has revealed significant vulnerabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) when exposed to malicious inputs. While various defense strategies have been proposed to mitigate these threats, there has been limited research into the underlying mechanisms that make…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2025

SATER: A Self-Aware and Token-Efficient Approach to Routing and Cascading

EMNLP 2025

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance across diverse tasks, yet their effectiveness frequently depends on costly commercial APIs or cloud services. Model selection thus entails a critical trade-off between performance and cost: high-performing LLMs typically incur substanti

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Tell Me What You Don’t Know: Enhancing Refusal Capabilities of Role-Playing Agents via Representation Space Analysis and Editing

ACL 2025finding

Role-Playing Agents (RPAs) have shown remarkable performance in various applications, yet they often struggle to recognize and appropriately respond to hard queries that conflict with their role-play knowledge. To investigate RPAs’ performance when faced with different types of conflicting requests,…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Toward Relative Positional Encoding in Spiking Transformers

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are bio-inspired networks that mimic how neurons in the brain communicate through discrete spikes, which have great potential in various tasks due to their energy efficiency and temporal processing capabilities. SNNs with self-attention mechanisms (spiking Transformers…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

TripTailor: A Real-World Benchmark for Personalized Travel Planning

ACL 2025finding

The continuous evolution and enhanced reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have elevated their role in complex tasks, notably in travel planning, where demand for personalized, high-quality itineraries is rising. However, current benchmarks often rely on unrealistic simulated data,…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

UPLex: Fine-Grained Personality Control in Large Language Models via Unsupervised Lexical Modulation

EMNLP 2025

Personality is a crucial factor that shapes human communication patterns, thereby regulating the personalities of large language models (LLMs) holds significant potential in enhancing their user experiences. Previous approaches either relied on fine-tuning LLMs on specific corpora or required manual

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Advancing Parameter Efficiency in Fine-tuning via Representation Editing

ACL 2024long

Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) has gained significant attention for its ability to achieve competitive results while updating only a small subset of trainable parameters. Despite the promising performance of current PEFT methods, they present challenges in hyperparameter selection, such as d…

2024

Advancing Spiking Neural Networks for Sequential Modeling with Central Pattern Generators

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) represent a promising approach to developing artificial neural networks that are both energy-efficient and biologically plausible. However, applying SNNs to sequential tasks, such as text classification and time-series forecasting, has been hindered by the challenge of…

2024

Aligning Large Language Models with Human Preferences through Representation Engineering

ACL 2024long

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is crucial for enhancing their utility in terms of helpfulness, truthfulness, safety, harmlessness, and interestingness. Existing methods for achieving this alignment often involve employing reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF…

2024

Efficient and Effective Time-Series Forecasting with Spiking Neural Networks

ICML 2024poster

Spiking neural networks (SNNs), inspired by the spiking behavior of biological neurons, provide a unique pathway for capturing the intricacies of temporal data. However, applying SNNs to time-series forecasting is challenging due to difficulties in effective temporal alignment, complexities in encod…

2024

Promoting Data and Model Privacy in Federated Learning through Quantized LoRA

EMNLP 2024finding

Conventional federated learning primarily aims to secure the privacy of data distributed across multiple edge devices, with the global model dispatched to edge devices for parameter updates during the learning process. However, the development of large language models (LLMs) requires substantial dat…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

Searching for Best Practices in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

EMNLP 2024main

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques have proven to be effective in integrating up-to-date information, mitigating hallucinations, and enhancing response quality, particularly in specialized domains. While many RAG approaches have been proposed to enhance large language models through que…

2024

Unraveling the Enigma of Double Descent: An In-depth Analysis through the Lens of Learned Feature Space

ICLR 2024poster

Double descent presents a counter-intuitive aspect within the machine learning domain, and researchers have observed its manifestation in various models and tasks. While some theoretical explanations have been proposed for this phenomenon in specific contexts, an accepted theory for its occurring me…

2023

Enhancing Unsupervised Semantic Parsing with Distributed Contextual Representations

ACL 2023findings

We extend a non-parametric Bayesian model of (Titov and Klementiev, 2011) to deal with homonymy and polysemy by leveraging distributed contextual word and phrase representations pre-trained on a large collection of unlabelled texts. Then, unsupervised semantic parsing is performed by decomposing sen…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2023

Hallucination Detection for Generative Large Language Models by Bayesian Sequential Estimation

EMNLP 2023long main

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made remarkable advancements in the field of natural language generation. However, the propensity of LLMs to generate inaccurate or non-factual content, termed "hallucinations", remains a significant challenge. Current hallucination detection methods often necessita…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Improving Empathetic Dialogue Generation by Dynamically Infusing Commonsense Knowledge

ACL 2023findings

In empathetic conversations, individuals express their empathy towards others. Previous work has mainly focused on generating empathetic responses by utilizing the speaker’s emotion. Besides, external commonsense knowledge has been applied to enhance the system’s understandings of the speaker’s situ…

2023

Measure Children's Mindreading Ability with Machine Reading

EMNLP 2023long findings

Recently, much research in psychology has benefited from the advances in machine learning techniques. Some recent studies showed that it is possible to build automated scoring models for children's mindreading. These models were trained on a set of manually-labeled question-response pairs, which we…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Parameter Efficient Multi-task Fine-tuning by Learning to Transfer Token-wise Prompts

EMNLP 2023long findings

Prompt tuning has been proven to be successful on various tasks by incorporating a small number of trainable parameters while freezing large pre-trained language models (PLMs). However, it is still unsettled how to generate more proper prompts for any individual examples and how to extend prompt tu…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

TableVLM: Multi-modal Pre-training for Table Structure Recognition

ACL 2023long

Tables are widely used in research and business, which are suitable for human consumption, but not easily machine-processable, particularly when tables are present in images. One of the main challenges to extracting data from images of tables is accurately recognizing table structures, especially fo…

2023

Watermarking PLMs on Classification Tasks by Combining Contrastive Learning with Weight Perturbation

EMNLP 2023long findings

Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved remarkable success, making them highly valuable intellectual property due to their expensive training costs. Consequently, model watermarking, a method developed to protect the intellectual property of neural models, has emerged as a crucial yet…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

Improving the Adversarial Robustness of NLP Models by Information Bottleneck

ACL 2022findings

Existing studies have demonstrated that adversarial examples can be directly attributed to the presence of non-robust features, which are highly predictive, but can be easily manipulated by adversaries to fool NLP models. In this study, we explore the feasibility of capturing task-specific robust fe…

2022

Regularized Molecular Conformation Fields

NeurIPS 2022accept

Predicting energetically favorable 3-dimensional conformations of organic molecules from molecular graph plays a fundamental role in computer-aided drug discovery research. However, effectively exploring the high-dimensional conformation space to identify (meta) stable conformers is anything but tri…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2022

Towards Adversarially Robust Text Classifiers by Learning to Reweight Clean Examples

ACL 2022findings

Most of the existing defense methods improve the adversarial robustness by making the models adapt to the training set augmented with some adversarial examples. However, the augmented adversarial examples may not be natural, which might distort the training distribution, resulting in inferior perfor…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2022

Weight Perturbation as Defense against Adversarial Word Substitutions

EMNLP 2022finding

The existence and pervasiveness of textual adversarial examples have raised serious concerns to security-critical applications. Many methods have been developed to defend against adversarial attacks for neural natural language processing (NLP) models.Adversarial training is one of the most successfu…

2021

Defense against Synonym Substitution-based Adversarial Attacks via Dirichlet Neighborhood Ensemble

ACL 2021long

Although deep neural networks have achieved prominent performance on many NLP tasks, they are vulnerable to adversarial examples. We propose Dirichlet Neighborhood Ensemble (DNE), a randomized method for training a robust model to defense synonym substitution-based attacks. During training, DNE form…

2021

Exploration and Exploitation: Two Ways to Improve Chinese Spelling Correction Models

ACL 2021short

A sequence-to-sequence learning with neural networks has empirically proven to be an effective framework for Chinese Spelling Correction (CSC), which takes a sentence with some spelling errors as input and outputs the corrected one. However, CSC models may fail to correct spelling errors covered by…

2021

On the Transferability of Adversarial Attacks against Neural Text Classifier

EMNLP 2021main

Deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, where a small perturbation to an input alters the model prediction. In many cases, malicious inputs intentionally crafted for one model can fool another model. In this paper, we present the first study to systematically investigate the tran…

Cited by 28SourcePDFScholar
2021

Searching for an Effective Defender: Benchmarking Defense against Adversarial Word Substitution

EMNLP 2021main

Recent studies have shown that deep neural network-based models are vulnerable to intentionally crafted adversarial examples, and various methods have been proposed to defend against adversarial word-substitution attacks for neural NLP models. However, there is a lack of systematic study on comparin…