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Xuejie Zhang

24 accepted papers

2026

LLMdoctor: Token-Level Flow-Guided Preference Optimization for Efficient Test-Time Alignment of Large Language Models

AAAI 2026technical

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences is critical, yet traditional fine-tuning methods are computationally expensive and inflexible. While test-time alignment offers a promising alternative, existing approaches often rely on distorted trajectory-level signals or inefficient sa

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

SAPO: Self-Adaptive Process Optimization Makes Small Reasoners Stronger

AAAI 2026technical

Existing self-evolution methods overlook the influence of fine-grained reasoning steps, which leads to the reasoner-verifier gap. The computational inefficiency of Monte Carlo (MC) process supervision further exacerbates the difficulty in mitigating the gap. Motivated by the Error-Related Negativity

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Step-GRPO: Enhancing Reasoning Quality and Efficiency via Structured PRM-Based Reinforcement Learning

AAAI 2026technical

Large reasoning models (LRMs) improve performance at test time by thinking longer, but this often leads to overthinking and high computational cost. To address this, recent reinforcement learning (RL) methods adopt outcome-level rewards, such as rule- or prompt-based signals, that favor shorter corr

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Data-Free Black-Box Federated Learning via Zeroth-Order Gradient Estimation

AAAI 2025technical

Federated learning (FL) enables decentralized clients to collaboratively train a global model under the orchestration of a central server without exposing their individual data. However, the iterative exchange of model parameters between the server and clients imposes heavy communication burdens, ri…

2025

Dual-Path Contrastive Short Text Clustering with High-order Random Walk

ICASSP 2025accepted

In recent years, several robust contrastive text clustering methods have been proposed. While these methods have achieved significant performances, two issues remain. First, the false negative problem is still not fully resolved, and the false positive issue also arises because all in-neighborhood a…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Hop-level Direct Preference Optimization for Knowledge Graph Reasoning with Trees

ICASSP 2025accepted

Recent advancements in knowledge graph question answering (KGQA) have shown promise, yet existing methods often fail to align with human reasoning patterns. This study proposes HD-PORT (hop-level direct preference optimization for knowledge graph reasoning with trees), a novel approach that combines…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Learning to Reason via Self-Iterative Process Feedback for Small Language Models

COLING 2025main

Small language models (SLMs) are more efficient, cost-effective, and customizable than large language models (LLMs), though they often underperform in specific areas like reasoning. Past methods for enhancing SLMs’ reasoning, such as supervised fine-tuning and distillation, often depend on costly ex…

2025

Multi-Attribute Multi-Grained Adaptation of Pre-Trained Language Models for Text Understanding from Bayesian Perspective

AAAI 2025technical

Current neural networks often employ multi-domain-learning or attribute-injecting mechanisms to incorporate non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) information for text understanding tasks by capturing individual characteristics and the relationships among samples. However, the extent…

2025

Reasoning with Trees: Faithful Question Answering over Knowledge Graph

COLING 2025main

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress in reasoning capabilities, yet they still face challenges in complex, multi-step reasoning tasks. This study introduces Reasoning with Trees (RwT), a novel framework that synergistically integrates LLMs with knowledge…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Sample-aware Adaptive Structured Pruning for Large Language Models

AAAI 2025technical

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved outstanding performance in natural language processing, but enormous model sizes and high computational costs limit their practical deployment. Structured pruning can effectively reduce the resource demands for deployment by removing redundant model paramet…

2025

Topology-of-Question-Decomposition: Enhancing Large Language Models with Information Retrieval for Knowledge-Intensive Tasks

COLING 2025main

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for general problem-solving across various domains yet remain constrained to chaining immediate reasoning steps and depending solely on parametric knowledge. Integrating an information retrieval system directly into the reasoning process of LLMs…

2025

Vision-aware Multimodal Prompt Tuning for Uploadable Multi-source Few-shot Domain Adaptation

AAAI 2025technical

Conventional multi-source domain few-shot adaptation (MFDA) faces the challenge of further reducing the load on edge-side devices in low-resource scenarios. Considering the native language-supervised advantage of CLIP and the plug-and-play nature of prompt to transfer CLIP efficiently, this paper in…

2024

DuetSim: Building User Simulator with Dual Large Language Models for Task-Oriented Dialogues

COLING 2024main

User Simulators play a pivotal role in training and evaluating task-oriented dialogue systems. Traditional user simulators typically rely on human-engineered agendas, resulting in generated responses that often lack diversity and spontaneity. Although large language models (LLMs) exhibit a remarkabl…

2024

Enhancing Semantics in Multimodal Chain of Thought via Soft Negative Sampling

COLING 2024main

Chain of thought (CoT) has proven useful for problems requiring complex reasoning. Many of these problems are both textual and multimodal. Given the inputs in different modalities, a model generates a rationale and then uses it to answer a question. Because of the hallucination issue, the generated…

2024

Improving Personalized Sentiment Representation with Knowledge-enhanced and Parameter-efficient Layer Normalization

COLING 2024main

Existing studies on personalized sentiment classification consider a document review as an overall text unit and incorporate backgrounds (i.e., user and product information) to learn sentiment representation. However, it is difficult when these methods meet the current pretrained language models (PL…

2024

Instruction Tuning with Retrieval-based Examples Ranking for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

ACL 2024findings

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) identifies sentiment information related to specific aspects and provides deeper market insights to businesses and organizations. With the emergence of large language models (LMs), recent studies have proposed using fixed examples for instruction tuning to refo…

2024

Personalized LoRA for Human-Centered Text Understanding

AAAI 2024technical

Effectively and efficiently adapting a pre-trained language model (PLM) for human-centered text understanding (HCTU) is challenging since user tokens are million-level in most personalized applications and do not have concrete explicit semantics. A standard and parameter-efficient approach (e.g., Lo…

2024

SoftMCL: Soft Momentum Contrastive Learning for Fine-grained Sentiment-aware Pre-training

COLING 2024main

The pre-training for language models captures general language understanding but fails to distinguish the affective impact of a particular context to a specific word. Recent works have sought to introduce contrastive learning (CL) for sentiment-aware pre-training in acquiring affective information.…

2024

Zero-Shot Cross-Domain Dialogue State Tracking via Dual Low-Rank Adaptation

ACL 2024long

Zero-shot dialogue state tracking (DST) seeks to enable dialogue systems to transition to unfamiliar domains without manual annotation or extensive retraining. Prior research has approached this objective by embedding prompts into language models (LMs). Common methodologies include integrating promp…

2023

Domain Generalization via Switch Knowledge Distillation for Robust Review Representation

ACL 2023findings

Applying neural models injected with in-domain user and product information to learn review representations of unseen or anonymous users incurs an obvious obstacle in content-based recommender systems. For the generalization of the in-domain classifier, most existing models train an extra plain-text…

2023

FedID: Federated Interactive Distillation for Large-Scale Pretraining Language Models

EMNLP 2023long main

The growing concerns and regulations surrounding the protection of user data privacy have necessitated decentralized training paradigms. To this end, federated learning (FL) is widely studied in user-related natural language processing (NLP). However, it suffers from several critical limitations inc…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Learning to Memorize Entailment and Discourse Relations for Persona-Consistent Dialogues

AAAI 2023technical

Maintaining engagement and consistency is particularly important in dialogue systems. Existing works have improved the performance of dialogue systems by intentionally learning interlocutor personas with sophisticated network structures. One issue with this approach is that it requires more personal…

2022

Accelerating Inference for Pretrained Language Models by Unified Multi-Perspective Early Exiting

COLING 2022main

Conditional computation algorithms, such as the early exiting (EE) algorithm, can be applied to accelerate the inference of pretrained language models (PLMs) while maintaining competitive performance on resource-constrained devices. However, this approach is only applied to the vertical architecture…

2022

Knowledge Distillation with Reptile Meta-Learning for Pretrained Language Model Compression

COLING 2022main

The billions, and sometimes even trillions, of parameters involved in pre-trained language models significantly hamper their deployment in resource-constrained devices and real-time applications. Knowledge distillation (KD) can transfer knowledge from the original model (i.e., teacher) into a compac…